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I finished your book tonight.
It was remarkable.
I feel like I know you both.

I'm on pg 42 of your book and I'm compelled to comment already. It, like discussions I've had about ideas, polarity, and dualism, keeps me on the edge of my seat with a tightening in my diaghragm that loosens my bowels. And wakes me. I tend to dream, but being awake & ready to go is good too I think Ann is a wise friend to have.

I'm literally hooked on your book!!!!! I love how you express your point of views and smoothly move from one subject to another. It's also amazing how you share your personal stories with each other. The more I read the more I become eager to learn about you and Ann. I've never talked to Ann or met her but reading your conversation made me feel like I've known her for a thousand years. Bravo, papa habibi.

Not only do Ann and Dean reestablish contact and share experiences but they continue to grow in the course of this ten month correspondence. And I imagine this process will be ongoing. They learn new things about one another — new knowledge, not only of their mutual growth in the intervening years, but new knowledge about how exactly they were "wayback when". For example, there are moving interchanges as they explore psychologically traumatic events in their lives that these two had not known about before. As reader I was drawn into the psychological depths that confronting, sharing and coming to terms with traumas demands. I felt that I was invited to share in these processes and not merely observe them as I read. Ann Agranoff's presentation of experiencing the impact of pathological arson at Cornell University, an event which endangered the lives and future psychological health of a whole group of students is significant as an event in history.

The broad range of ideas, viewpoints and experiences in this conversation establishes relevance and significance, but there is a second achievement that makes this a document of unique importance. The conversation is a dramatic embodiment of the engagement of two contrasting minds in the process of psychological growth through each other.

I just found your name on the internet. So good to know that both of us seem to be thriving after half a century. Steve Z. seems good — we've written back and forth several times over the years. Alan A. became the world's expert in "magic squares". Did you ever finish your book on Sacajawea?

Drop by my book club some day and meet Rachel. She's a German scholar who emigrated to NYC in 2011. Visit to get all the details.

You look great, and so does Rachel! I see Steve a lot on Facebook, and I saw him in person in 2010, when we were out west. I've written to Allan, but he dropped me when my email was hacked, although I fixed it quickly, I thought.

Fred & I are doing well; he's retired and I'm thinking about it. I was never able to publish the book about Ce Malinalli, but Fred & I did publish a nonfiction book together called . We also built a comfortable house up in the Catskills, and Fred did most of the work himself. So I'm very happy with my life, but concerned about human destruction of the biosphere. We have one lovely daughter, who's living out west, and I'm so scared about what she may have to endure. So I march: I've marched on Washington 3 times, and I was in the big March in NYC. Well, I'll take a look at your website; it sounds interesting.

Maybe we should meet for dinner some time. Fred always enjoys meeting people from my dim past. We live in Jackson Heights, which has good Thai, Peruvian, and Indian. And we certainly make it into Manhattan now and then.

Rachel and I would love to have dinner with you and Fred. I can't walk much anymore, so I would ask that we have dinner anytime you like at the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant, at Ninth street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

When we meet, I'll give you a copy of Rachel's book.

I think we could come to Manhattan for dinner on Tuesday, Dec. 9, if that works for you. I finished grading all the papers that were turned in, for now.

I downloaded Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy and I'm reading the chapter on Plato. I hope to come to your group in January, since Plato is probably the only philosopher I'm at all familiar with. We read something of his in my Greek class at Cornell back in the 1960s, as well as some Euripides.

We'll be away in February and March. We're checking out Incline Village, Nevada, where our daughter goes to school, and we may end up moving there. It's very beautiful, although of course I would miss the intellectual stimulation of NYC. But those mountains! That lake!

Tuesday is good. Let us know when to be there.

The book club meeting on Plato will be Saturday, December 27. I hope you can still come.

Tuesday at 7 pm is good for us. I have the book club meeting correctly marked on my calendar, and I will try to make it.

So we'll see you tonight at the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant at 7 pm?

I was just about to write you. Rachel has been getting sick. She was hoping to be over it by now, but this morning she's been throwing up. I think I'd rather meet you and Fred when Rachel can be there.

Maybe in a week? Or after the holidays?

I'm eager to meet you again, but after a half a century, I don't feel particularly rushed!!! (:>)

Sure, that's fine. My daughter comes in next week, and we'll be busy with her for a while. Let's talk after Xmas.

I think it will be more fun if we can all make it. I almost feel like I'm meeting someone new. You don't seem much like the moody, melancholy teenager I remember.

Tell Rachel I hope she feels better soon.

I was melancholy because my best friend, Karl, betrayed me. But when a girl in college fell in love with me I slowly crawled out of that abyss. I've been very happy ever since.

I'm glad to hear you've been happy ever since college. Personally, I have my ups and downs, but I guess I'm more happy than not. I read the chapter about Plato, and it was interesting to see how relevant his concerns are. Right now I'm in Vermont, visiting friends and skiing.

Thanks for the news. I think we both did great, especially considering how ignorant this civilization is about human needs and purposes. You were lucky in having relatively great parents, which I didn't. I remember one incident when I was acting like a jerk and your mom told me to stop. I respected her for that.

We have a lot to discuss

It was fun meeting you for the second time at the book club yesterday, and meeting Rachel for the first time. I thought you were so funny; I don't remember young Dean being funny at all. I did have a crush on you back then, but it sounds like everybody did!

Well, I guess you've now redefined shyness for all eternity: "Waiting half a century before admitting you once had a crush on somebody!"

I would love to have known that you felt that way about me back then. On the other hand, I wouldn't have known how to react to it. I thought that if you hugged a girl it was a commitment to marry her. Even kissing seemed yucky and unappealing. I think that my coldness was partly due to the fact that my sister and I had parents who didn't like children and never hugged them. (The only time they ever touched us was to inflict pain.) Steve and an Asian boy named Brian admitted to having sexual feelings about me, but (good Catholic that I was) I didn't respect sexual instincts, and in any case had no interest in being (or becoming) gay.

I had to wait till my second year of college before an "older woman" named Judy — I was 18 and she was 23 — took pity on me and let me sleep with her. This started as a kind of mentoring relationship but, over the next several years, became a real romantic relationship.

I was fairly passive back then, but I was only 14 or so. We did have a few make-out parties back in junior high, basically when someone with a basement got permission to have a party, but my peers weren't as interesting to me as you older guys. My parents were definitely stars compared to a lot of others. My dad was very affectionate. My mom had a traumatic childhood and spent time in an orphanage, but she did her best, and she was very practical. She told me to wait until I was 20 to have sex, because she thought it was better to be mature, but she never laid any religious trips on me. So I followed her advice, but I missed out on one gorgeous opportunity when I was 18. It was another one of those complicated things. My best friend Tod was gay, and he adored this Midwestern guy that he met at a summer program. Let's call him "Ted". Anyway, Ted and Tod had a one time fling, but Ted was pretty straight, so when he came to visit Tod in NY, he ended up making out with me. Tod was sad that it wasn't him, but it did allow us all to remain close, in a weird sort of way. But I was only 17 and 18 when I was seeing him, and I would only go so far, and I regretted it for a long time. Now I don't regret much of anything, except that I should have become an environmentalist back in 1980. So, are we all really poly sexual?

Yes we are all poly sexual, only I would simplify it by saying simply that we are all sexual, period. This need to categorize people into heterosexuality and homosexuality is a delusion. When you fall in love it's not about genitalia, it's about personalities. If we need to think in categories, you might say that introverts are attracted to extroverts and vice versa.

I don't think you were passive. I think you were an introvert. Introverts have a lot to give the world. They are better at formulating insights than extroverts, for instance. They are better at loving, too. Extroverts, by analogy, are better at working out methods, and for taking responsibility in the world around them.

I've spent most of my life studying introversion and extroversion, because I saw these traits in all the people I knew back then and yet all people talked about was whether you were a girl or a boy, and (gasp!) if you were "a homosexual".

Ron Gold, one of the leaders of the gay rights movement, was (like me) also a student of Paul Rosenfels. You might enjoy reading this essay by him:

I think your next reading choice for the group is inspired, by the way!

Isn't that introvert-extrovert attraction thing covered in a quote from ? Something like, "A man may not know whether he is an introvert or an extrovert, but he always wakes up next to his opposite on his wedding day."

I really don't remember what I was like at ages 13 to 15 very clearly, but I think I was well developed intellectually but not too well developed socially. I skipped 3rd grade, and then I finished college in 3 years, by age 20, so I was out in the world before I really knew how to flirt or how to judge people very well. I traveled in Europe for about a year and then I moved back in with my parents for another 3 years. I worked, but I mostly concentrated on my social life. Once I was confident in that, I decided to study architecture, and I met Fred in an interior design course. We were both working on our portfolios, and then he got an M. Arch. from U. of P., and I got one from Yale. We've been together since I was 24 and he was 28. Building our house has been our joint artistic project; raising April has been our joint humanistic project.

I was shy as a child, but I don't consider myself at all shy now. I'm not introverted in the usual popular sense, and I always come out right on the border between introversion and extroversion when I take quizzes. But if you're using it to mean having an active interior mental life, yes, definitely. The personality theory that I have been most attracted to is the , which talks about 9 different motivational types. I was really into it for a while, and I went to workshops and conferences. It liberated me in that I realized that not everybody has to be good at everything, and I'm actually a very good 1. I had been busy feeling inferior to my mom, who was a 3, and good at totally different things. In the Enneagram, I am definitely Type 1, dedicated to improving oneself or the world. In terms, 1 has a high J scale, very judgmental. I've toned it down with meditation, and I don't usually inflict it on others, but I have an active inner judge.

My husband is basically more shy than I am, but he is an extrovert in that he likes to do physical things, and he drags me out camping and skiing, which I enjoy once I'm there. He's a 6 on the Enneagram, very loyal, but fear-based, worried about who is out to get him, scanning the landscape for danger. 1 and 6 make a good pairing. I worked to improve society, and he worked to support the family. He's low in J, which is good, because I can't stand to be around other judgmental people unless they are fantastically evolved and relaxed. He's high in P, the opposite scale from J, which means he tends to be spontaneous or distractible. Again, that's great for me; it keeps me from getting too serious.

I suspect that you are Type 4 on the Enneagram. Type 4 has the most extravagant, romantic inner life of anyone. Lots of artists are 4. But it's just a guess on my part.

Is Rachel an extrovert or an introvert? I wanted to hear her describe her own ideas more, and I was quite annoyed when Michael started telling her what she thought. That's probably why I told them they were off-topic. I thought Michael was intelligent but overbearing. Are you planning to rein him in if he comes back, or do you like more of a free-for-all?

Shy, me? You should have seen me dancing naked in the boys' dorm bathroom in Cornell, in front of a wall of mirrors. I was dating a dorm counselor, and everyone else had gone home for Christmas, so we had the place to ourselves. (He later decided to stick to men, and he died young, alas.)

As for my best friend Tod, he became a Trappist monk, and he now runs a monastery in Brazil. For a while, I was angry that he rejected all sex, but it probably saved his life.

It's going to take me a while to digest the Ron Gold article. I'm enjoying all your links. I actually just co-taught a gender unit with a psychology teacher, so I guess it's my year to get educated on gender issues!

Do you want to tell me in an email how Karl betrayed you, or should we get together for confidences in the spring?

Thanks for looking forward to by . If you're not familiar with his work, you're in for a real treat.

Jung had a lot to say about psychological polarity, and even coined the terms introvert and extrovert. But he understood these types in a pretty clinical and distant way. Paul Rosenfels also started out with the idea of polarity, but saw this dimension of the human personality as critical to understanding how people (of any sexual persuasion) develop mated relationships. In fact it's the key to their ability to live creative lives. Introverts are basically intellectuals who seek insight through loving and help others through teaching. This describes you fairly well, no? Extroverts are basically [wo]men of action who attain mastery by taking responsibility, and help others through leading. My guess is that Fred is quite a bit like this.

The quizzes you take won't tell you anything about yourself. They are developed for commercial reasons only, and target gullible victims desperate for any smidgeon of insight they can scrape out of the local dumpster. Sorry, but I've been battling conventional shrinks for most of my lifetime and know what I'm talking about. 40 years ago R. D. Laing told me after one of his lectures that the DSM (the — the psychiatrist's "bible") is only a 20th-century version of the . 'Nough said.

Jung thought that introverts and extroverts could never be friends because they lived in separate worlds. This is like saying you can't really be involved with anybody who lives in a different building. Introverts and extroverts are attracted to one another because, as Socrates said in the , they complete each other. Since we're talking about human beings, the way these tendencies are worked out in real life over many years is a complex story. I won't, and would never, try to simplify it into a simple pseudo-scientific chart as we've seen so often in modern psychology. Only talking about it more with me will help you grasp what Paul discovered and what I've been trying to disseminate ever since I met him in the late 60's.

Michael wasn't the only one who was in a mood for a free-for-all. Rather than be a control-freak, I decided to let the new members get to know one another in this way. We will soon get back to the topic I formed the book club for, and if Michael can't focus he will definitely be reigned in. I never predict before-hand exactly how I will do this. But after many years running the Ninth Street Center and other groups, I can assure you that he is not big enough to be my enemy. Actually, he is a pretty lonely guy who doesn't know how to open up, and instead habitually hits on women and hangs out in bars. To help him we will have to convince him that learning about the history of ideas might give him some insights into his own aimlessness and lack of purpose. Let's try, anyway.

Karl betrayed me by saying he loved me and then, after a summer vacation, repeatedly murdering me with an "air machine gun" whenever he caught a glimpse of me. My friend Laurie Bell used to go to communist summer camps with him and says that all of these kids were indoctrinated with Stalinist ideology — which means you shouldn't get sentimental about inferior people who need to be exterminated. I could tell you a lot more about him, but people who let "dead white men" like Marx and Stalin think for them are just not important.

Rachel is an introvert. To resort to such a neologism is a rather dry way of saying anything, isn't it? Actually, in his first book Paul used the terms "yielding" and "assertive", but when he moved back to New York and gathered lots of gay students, they decided to appropriate the conventional terms "feminine" and "masculine", and Paul decided that these were better. So Rachel is "a feminine" and I am "a masculine". Your next reading assignment is to consume her memoir about discovering me:

Yes, I always read you as masculine. I actually think using "masculine" and "feminine" to describe personality traits is a bad idea if you want to reach a lot of straight people, who tend to get defensive if you describe them as contrary to their genitals. I can see how the self-identified "gay" people had fun with those terms, of course.

Another problem is that you seem to be talking as if there is only one axis that all personalities are lined up on, and that seems inadequate to me. The Enneagram is more like a clock, with the 9 types positioned all around it. When you start to know someone, you may only know what sector he will belong to, but eventually you are able to place him more precisely. For example, I am in the gut sector, which contains 8 9 and 1. We all tend to make decisions with the gut.

I also think the people who refined the Enneagram (Jesuits, mostly, as a tool for spiritual development) were smart to identify the 9 types only with numbers, because it prevents us from bringing in the baggage associated with any ordinary word. They emphasize that all types are equally valuable, that no type is better than any other. When you use a word like "masculine," you bring in the connotation that it is better, at least in a patriarchal society like those that rule most of the world.

The Enneagram has nothing to do with conventional shrinks. It's a spiritual system that came out of some ideas that Gurdjieff supposedly got from the Sufis. The most powerful part is that at a convention they have panels, so you can listen to a group of people, all the same number, discuss their lives. It is really illuminating to hear how they dealt with similar themes, each in his own way, of course. It basically gave me chills. Of course, once you deal with your first theme, your number, you are free to develop other aspects of yourself. Once I let go of some of my judgment, I moved on to be more like a 7 and have fun and go after a variety of experiences.

Another important idea I got from Jung (well, actually from my friend Dick Campbell, who kept simplifying Jung for me) is that if you don't do your inner work (through Enneagram or Polarity or whatever) by middle age, you turn into a caricature of yourself. Well, I think there's hope at any age, but we all know people who never did any introspection and did become caricatures. Unfortunately, a lot of politicians are like that!

I certainly was a shy child, and I was interested in love as a young woman, and I read a lot of books, but once I hit 40 I found myself occupied mainly with service and leadership. I was often chair of the leadership committee at my daughter's school, sometimes president of the PTA, and am currently president of my coop. I was part of a writing group for many years, which we ran as a coop following Peter Elbow's principles, but I had a bit of a leadership role hosting meetings, interviewing new members, etc. And what on earth is teaching except a leadership position? So when you divide people up into teachers and leaders, I don't know what distinction you are trying to make. The theory I just made up this fall is that there are two poles of leadership. There is a more democratic leadership that works best in small groups and that most groups had when we were hunter-gatherers. But now that almost everyone has been forced into mass societies, a lot of people think that only a macho leader can head the whole thing, and they are actually happy when someone like Putin takes over. I see more women in leadership roles in small groups, but as the group gets larger, it's more and more likely to be headed by a bald-headed, testosterone-oozing man. I don't think that's positive, but I don't know what could counteract it.

I am glad that you have the confidence and leadership skills to run your group, and I'm kind of sorry I'll be away for February and March, because I'll probably miss whatever happens between you and Michael. At first I thought "Enlightenment" meant it was a spiritual group, and then the blurb explained it was about philosophy, and now I think you like having a multitude of connotations.

I have been thinking about how learning disabilities, autism, and transgender identifications are all incresing, which brings me to my one problem with Ron Gold's amiable essay. Part of all this is biochemical, because our culture has saturated our fetuses with a constantly changing and increasing stew of chemicals (through food, medicine, cosmetics, toiletries, etc.) So, cultural acceptance won't decrease transgender, which is actually increasing right now. It's very important to accept transgender people, but many of them will still want surgery or hormones or other physical interventions. They don't feel like they have the wrong personality; they feel like they have the wrong body. At least that is my take after reading the relevant, carefully researched chapter in by .

I love Rachel's writing style, but I was confused about the context. Did you write those letters? Was she the Rachel they were for? Well, it's obviously a beautiful romance, in any case.

Will I be able to get you to look at an Enneagram book? Or do you already have all the answers you will ever need?

"Using 'masculine' and 'feminine' to describe personality traits is a bad idea if you want to reach a lot of straight people, who tend to get defensive if you describe them as contrary to their genitals."

You're right. But it would also be a bad idea to want to reach a lot of straight people. You have to see this project in much broader terms. Think Locke. Think Hume. What were these guys looking for? The immediate thing to say is that they were looking for a science of human nature that would be as self-evident and useful as Newton's science of physics. Nowadays, we have resorted to neologisms like "psychology" and "psychoanalysis", which by their very definition are specialized areas of knowledge owned by the experts, all of whom charge fees for disseminating any of it. Sound familiar? The Sophists that Socrates railed against were doing the exact same thing.

You have to get back to basics just as Socrates did if you want to understand the Rosenfelsian Revolution. It's not about tweaking the ideas of conventional, self-satisfied and smug folks who like the status quo just fine but don't mind tinkering around the edges as a hobby. It's about renouncing the very terms which we have used for a hundred years to obfuscate human nature so that the experts could hold it hostage. It's a semantic project of reaffirming fundamental concepts like love and power, honesty and courage, and faith and hope. These are the ideas that have shown their value for many centuries. We cannot let them be usurped by the neologisms of gearheads. What Paul did was not merely to chalk up a few independent discoveries about characterology. He tried, and I feel has succeeded, to establish a new dictionary of human nature, so that people who are serious about understanding and communicating about their human world have a leg to stand on. What does being serious means? It means not resting until disease, poverty, ignorance and war have been abolished from our world.

"You seem to be talking as if there is only one axis that all personalities are lined up on, and that seems inadequate to me."

Again you're right, if you want lots of personalities to have their own name. But again, this is not what we're trying to do. This problem reminds me of the Linnaean Revolution. Before Linnaeus, thousands of animals had different names, well-defined names. But this didn't help anyone understand their relationships. So Linnaeus arranged the animals on a tree, grouping species into genera, genera into families, families into orders, orders into classes, and classes into three kingdoms. He did this from a quite common-sense point of view, working from anatomical details. These days we have a better organizing principle called cladistics, which arranges ancestry based on probable evolutionary relationships. As a result, we now have at least five kingdoms! Maybe someday we'll have more understanding of more types of personalities. But just naming them won't give us useable insight into where they came from or where they're going. That's why Paul and I prefer to "keep it simple" for now.

"When you use a word like 'masculine,' you bring in the connotation that it is better, at least in a patriarchal society like those that rule most of the world."

Newton didn't ask himself whether his four laws of motion would offend those who rule most of the world. He only asked if they were true. We also are not interested in "selling" our ideas to anyone. If they find them useful, they're welcome to use them and make them their own. That's how knowledge spreads, not by monetizing ad-hoc gimmicks like the "Meyers-Briggs Instrument". No serious thinker has ever thought that masculinity was better than femininity: neither Socrates nor Jung nor Paul nor me nor Rachel, and especially not someone as smart as you. It would be like a mathematician claiming that plus was morally superior to minus.

"I think there's hope at any age, but we all know people who never did any introspection and did become caricatures. Unfortunately, a lot of politicians are like that!"

I agree completely with this sentiment. Of all the 60-something people I know, you seem the most open to new ideas, and that tells me that there's something very special, and precious, about you. I would just expand your word "introspection" by saying that even those who are not introspective by nature, like me, can still be quite serious about their personal growth, their effectiveness in making a creative contribution to the history of the world. I am very dependent on the ideas of feminine people like Paul. My genius lies in being very, very careful to pick those I will listen to and those who I will walk away from. And this comes from many years of trial and error — including studying the Great Books at St. John's College.

"What on earth is teaching except a leadership position?"

Sometimes Paul's distinctions are not immediately clear. Here he's trying to refine these terms so that teaching means helping someone to acquire insights and leading means helping someone to acquire skills.

This doesn't mean that feminines can't be leaders and masculines can't be teachers. I, for example, am trying to teach Paul's ideas. Paul always stressed that fact that truth and right were the property of all men. But he observed that masculines were better at developing new skills, while feminines were better at developing new insights. Once developed, of course, anybody can acquire them.

This was one of the hardest ideas to get across to the kids that flocked to the Ninth Street Center in the 70's. Many of them became living caricatures of polarity, the feminine boys telling masculines to "shut up", and the masculine boys telling feminines to "just obey". Slowly the Center weeded these folks out and we were left with people who saw in the growth process something more than just the opportunity to play a role, such as the current "role-model" fans advocate.

Although I don't admire Ron Gold as much as he would like, I do think he's made a serious attempt in his lifetime to understand human nature. His essay on transgender — which rubbed his gay friends the wrong way and got him kicked out of the movement — is quite on target in seeing the problem. He insists, as Paul would and I do, that polarity is a question of how you relate to others, not what your genitals look like. I've known hundreds of feminine men and masculine women who do just fine in the "wrong body". Genital-worship is just a subset of sexism. Sometimes I use the word "heteromania" but I want to discourage my use, and invention, of neologisms.

I wrote my letters to a young poet named Rachel who reached out to me from darkest Louisiana in 1999 and said she wanted a mentor. After six years of trying, I had to give up on her, but not before she gave me permission to reprint my letters. She has since disappeared and may well be in jail or a mental hospital. A year after my giving up, Rachel Bartlett found these letters and made them her own.

Loan me an Enneagram book!

Since you are a prolific reader, I'm going to suggest the following documents for you at least to skim:

I'm so glad you are feeling better!

As far as masculine and feminine are concerned, we'll have to agree to disagree, since you all are obviously very attached to those terms. I am at least starting to understand what you mean. When you talk about skill versus insight, that certainly rings a bell for me. That falls along Jung's axis of sensation versus intuition, which is the most important axis for my personality. I am very highly dedicated to intuition and insight, and my friends are mostly similar people, whom I meet at science fiction conventions, drumming circles, women's consciousness raising groups, and similar places. My husband is totally opposite to me in that he's more practical and more interested in making things, building things, and yes, developing skills. We have good friends in Vermont who are similar. The husband is always fixing up his inn, and he and Fred go off and look at the electrical system or the heating system together and discuss improvements and actually enjoy it! Thank goodness the wife is a psychologist and a great reader and I can talk to her. Oh, I know you don't like psychologists, but they are both the kindest people in the world, and Kay does pretty good work trying to help people with multiple problems.

OK, that's plenty for today. I'll just write back a little at a time, since you are not 100%, and I have to go downstairs and entertain my sister-in-law and my nephew, who are visiting us up here in the Catskills.

I hope you and Rachel are warm and cozy and not minding the storm.

That discussion was wild on Saturday. Your people are so smart and well read and impossible to keep on topic! Your task is definitely like herding cats. I was a bit shocked that Rachel didn't realize that Obama had been deporting illegal aliens like crazy. Give me her email and I'll send her an article.

We're working on preparing for our long trip, and that's not too hard, but emotionally I have something else preoccupying me. I have a very close friend, Dick, who's one of the few people I can talk to about things like personality. He's dying of a rare cancer, and that's hard, but it's even more complicated than that. He's always been eccentric. Some people think he's crazy or obnoxious, but I always thought he was interesting, and we're very fond of each other, and I've always been able to bring him back when he started to go off the deep end, but now he's developed an obsession with some of our other friends, and he's trying to pull me into it, and it's very hard to deal with. I think it's partly because Fred & I are going away for 2 months, and he's trying to replace us, but these other people are not ready to step in. I almost feel guilty for going away, but he's had this sarcoma for a couple of years, and he's been valiantly fighting it with various alternative treatments, and I was starting to believe that he would succeed. But then he demanded that I come over on Sunday, and he was panting and coughing and his lungs are obviously shot, so I think the end is near. He's still trying to go to Romania for hyperthermia treatment if he can arrange it, but I don't think he's going to make it, and all he wants to talk about is this other family and how he's going to help them with their problems. And these are not real problems, but issues that he is fantasizing.

Well, I feel a little better just writing that down! I've had lots of people die on me, my father, my mother, my favorite aunt, my favorite cousin, my wonderful friend Wendy L. , but it's harder when the person doesn't have any close family. Wendy didn't have family either, and she started to get weird for a while, but then she pulled out of it, and even towards the end we were able to laugh together and enjoy our special relationship. But I feel like everything is disintegrating with Dick, even our relationship.

You might have met Wendy. She would have been a skinny girl with an aquiline nose and big glasses, back then, very smart. She went to Vassar and developed her mind and her figure. She was really a wonderful friend, always finding interesting things for us to do together, like Gilbert & Sullivan operettas in Yiddish or Ancient Greek plays in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

I had tea with Bruce R. after the meeting on Saturday, and he asked me twice if I had any friends who shared my cultural interests, and I kept changing the subject, because I didn't feel like saying that I have 2, but one is dead and the other is dying.

So maybe you have some wisdom or experiences you want to share? I think you can see why I'm not ready to discuss theories of personality again right now, although I expect I'll want to come back to them later!

I'm so sorry to hear about Dick. His desperation in seeking alternate therapies is unfortunate. An Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware has recently recorded her extensive observations of the elderly in Their number one regret was: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

Of course, the answer to that is simple: distinguish between your creative and adaptive needs. Pay the rent, yes, but then focus on your real goals. I've always done this, and I can tell you honestly that I have no fear of death. ("I just don't want to be there when it happens!" — Woody Allen) I've said a bit more about the "Philosophy 101" mistakes people make about death here:

Don't raise big issues with Dick any more. Just be kind to him and assure him that he's given you a lot and that you're grateful for being in his life. When a person is deprived of a future, focus on how wonderful the present is.

Bruce is a terrific human being, but his mind wanders and you have to pull him back to the topic at hand. And you can be completely honest and candid with him.

My people are well-read, but sometimes over-educated and unwilling or unable to entertain new ideas (unlike you). My goals are so much larger than just "learning about the Age of Enlightenment", but since you have to lure people in with fruit that whets their appetite, I settled for the most familiar albeit muted example of this phenomenon in recent history. As you can see, my problems are quite similar to those of Odd John.

Rachel is quite interested in you.

Here are some aphorisms I've written about death:

It's not that Dick is bitter; it's more like he's let go of sanity. He's having sexual delusions about our friends, that this one is a premature ejaculator, that his wife is sexually dissatisfied, and that Dick needs to discuss all this with them in order to help them! And someone else, on no evidence at all, is a bisexual spreading AIDS, but Dick knows the alternative treatment that will cure him! When I say he's hard to deal with, I really really mean he's hard to deal with. But yes, I'll try to focus on being kind to him, and reminding him of some of the times in the past when he was really helpful to people, like me and his dead girlfriend Margo, back when he was more sane.

Thanks for the great aphorisms!

When my mother was dying, she had gotten quite weak and quiet, but I felt the need to say something. "Mom, I feel like you're going to die soon," I said, and I started crying like crazy. She got much more alert and spoke clearly. "I don't mind," she said. "It's what I expect."

Your mother was right not to be afraid. It was you who was about to deal with a great loss, after all, not her.

Sounds like you should be collecting aphorisms too!

I find it interesting to review (and revise) mine once a year or so. It's like trimming your beard in a mirror, only it's a psychological mirror.

Light reading for our fellow grammar queens:

That was an entertaining essay, but I don't agree with you about dictionaries. I've learned a lot from them over the years, and I don't regard a home without a good dictionary as being the abode of educated people. I think it's really sad that the generation I teach doesn't use them. People who just google words don't seem to understand the whole process of evaluating different meanings and checking out origins that we used to go through, and they come up with awful travesties for synonyms and paraphrases.

I'm also not entirely comfortable with all that bashing of teachers and professors, since my whole family have always been teachers and I work with a wonderful department of English professors at Queensborough. Most of us put in a huge amount of effort to try to teach our students, mostly immigrants and working class young people, to express their ideas as clearly as possible, and that's something to be proud of, it seems to me.

But I did like those bits about the sudden, weird switches in the language. What drives me crazy is the horrible use of nominative pronouns after prepositions, like "for he and I." I don't know exactly when it started, but I don't think anyone did that when I was a kid. Then the mistake was the opposite, like using "me" as a subject. So now people who want to sound educated are over compensating, using subjects when objects are required, and sounding completely pretentious.

Well, I have finally adjusted to the altitude enough to write something longer than a paragraph!

The snow is lacking out here (because it's all back east?), but we still have managed to do some skiing. How are you and Rachel doing? I hope neither of you got sick from that difficult man's coughing. My daughter went skiing in Colorado and caught a 12-hour stomach flu. It cost me $450 to bring her back to Nevada on a later plane, so she wouldn't throw up all over her fellow passengers. But surely an airline would move sick people to a later plane for free, if we lived in a rational society?

Dick went to Bulgaria, where they refused to give him hyperthermia because his hemoglobin was too low and they didn't think he would live through it. Good for the Bulgarian clinic! I was afraid they would take his money and kill him, but instead they sent him back to NYC, where he is ranting about how all doctors are knaves or fools.

It's really gorgeous out here, but the days of powder skiing are gone, it seems.

I have a whole bookcase of specialized dictionaries and one-volume encyclopedias. Very useful. I wish they were all online.

I think the problem may be that I'm too emphatic in some of my rants. I don't really get much feedback, so I have no idea what people are hearing when I open my mouth. I rail against the academics and psychologists who deserve our scorn, but there are lots of academics and psychologists who I consider allies.

I just wanted to make it clear that I find your criticisms very helpful. Please stay with me, okay? Don't give up just because we may occasionally see things differently. You'd have to expect that after a 50-year intermission.

My policy about human communication is simple: Teach me everything you know that I've never learned, and I'll teach you everything I know that you've never learned. This way the process is all win-win.

Of course you have a whole bookcase of reference materials. That's how intellectuals have functioned for a long time. I'll have to ask a young intellectual what they do now, but it looks like they are constantly on their iPhones, accepting whatever pops up as Gospel, and the problem is that much of it is dreck, and they have no idea how to discriminate. At least that's how it seems to me. I worked for years as a proofreader and a copy editor, and I was trained by very good people, and we really cared what dictionary we used and what style we used, and now that all seems to be gone. Well, your main point may be true. Maybe we do make the language we need, and maybe we need language chaos right now to deal with our chaotic culture

I'm going to try to stick to Gmail for a while, but I got your other email too. I'm happy to give feedback and to be honest. I love talking about writing and language.

(1) If you still want to talk about by in April, I would like to discuss the 14th chapter, "Two Cultures," which is the chapter that divides up the major religions into Semitic versus IndoEuropean. I was shocked to discover that my whole orientation was IE, when I would have guessed that it would be S.

(2) Another book I would like to discuss with your group at some point is the short work by . He goes over 6 reasons why civilizations collapse, gleaned from various famous historians, and it unfortunately seems clear that our civilization is suffering from all of them. I would really enjoy hearing some intelligent people react to it, hopefully contradicting it, but I can't get anyone I know to look at it.

It's fine if you decide to go in some other direction. I understand that it's important to go with whatever energy seems to be exciting the group.

I found a really good aide to take care of Dick physically, and I encouraged his cousin, who is his executor and bill payer, to vent his frustrations until he was able to go back to paying the bills and trying to get Dick into another clinic. I relaxed so much once I was able to convince Helen (the aide) to take the job. At least he will die in a clean apartment, and someone will be cleaning his clothes and cooking for him. Also, once the apartment was clean, he allowed one of our mutual friends to visit and say her farewells, and that was beneficial to both of them.

We are not going to move out to Nevada. I love Incline Village, but it seems like climate change has already come to Lake Tahoe, with a deep drought and unseasonably warm weather. It's kind of lovely to wander around in the fifties in the sun, but it's supposed to be 10 to 20 degrees colder, with periodic heavy snowstorms. Since my husband wants to devote his retirement to skiing, we're going to have to stay in the Northeast. I'm thinking about New Hampshire or Vermont, ultimately, but we'll probably be in NYC for another year.

I just reread your email of January 15, and I love your ambition! Of course I just noticed that you gave me a reading list at the end, so I'd better take a look at some of those before I write any more.

Thanks for doing such a splendid job yesterday, leading the discussion of the chapter "Two Cultures" in Sophie's World. It was wonderful to see you again and I was delighted that everybody spoke of you afterwards with high praise and deep gratitude.

I forgot to tell you that Rachel and I had spent much of last week reviewing the two books you had lent us. Since she had studied the Enneagram in her youth, Rachel tackled that book, and I focused on . Her essay is called and my essay is .

Since Rachel and I are used to writing snarky social criticism, I feel we didn't do justice to the time and energy you've spent studying these systems. I tried in my essay to credit you for making me realize this. In any case, I won't be satisfied until you and I can find circumstances wherein a deeper kind of sharing can take root — something like what used to be called "co-counseling". I really need a critic like you in my life to help me see where my arrogance has obscured my candor. And, of course, Rachel and I would love to have dinner with you and Fred, any time that's good for you guys.

You're very welcome! I enjoyed it a lot, too. It was fortunate that Shrikant was there, because he had the experience of living in both cultures, and he expresses himself very well. But I do think I did a good job of prying reactions out of almost everybody. Such interesting people!

Rachel mentioned the essays yesterday, and I look forward to seeing what you both came up with. I love the dedication with which you live your intellectual lives.

I agree that eventually we should spend some time together just the 2 of us, at least to trade mission statements, since we both seem to dream of larger missions than the average person. But I'd rather do the dinner for 4 first, so Fred knows who I'm hanging out with. And right now we need to hunker down and do taxes, so let's make plans in a couple of weeks.

Thanks for the chance to lead a philosophy discussion!

I can't make Abby's concert, since I'll be in the country that weekend, but thanks for keeping me posted. I am slowly working my way through all the reading material you have given me, in between planning Dick's memorial and doing the chores that piled up while we were away. I read first and I enjoyed it, although I did want to argue with your views on race and on language acquisition (no, race isn't a useful concept, and no, children don't acquire language on their own!), but I don't want to get into those issues right now. I am looking forward to reading , but I might take a look at Rachel's Enneagram essay next. It is fun having such talented writers in my life!

I'm not going to Abby's concert either. I just posted her message because she asked me to.

Rachel and I love having you in our lives. We are such lofty birds of prey that it's quite sobering when an earth-bound creature takes us seriously enough to make thoughtful counterpoints to our barbs.

We'll have much to talk about in the coming months and years.

Thanks for coming to the book club today. You made a real, and quite original, contribution. Plus, everybody loves you.

Love ya'

Thanks for your kind words. The group definitely makes my life more interesting. But, honestly, I got a little scared when we strayed into modern politics. Although Larry is brilliant and charming, he seems to be in the area I would call flaky right-wing. So I need to ask: am I throwing in my lot with people who want to get rid of Medicare and Social Security, and who don't want any government regulation? I just joined (CCL), and I am going to be lobbying for a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend. I think I need to know how far off our positions are before I give you and the group my whole heart. I am assuming that you and I agree that personal growth is good, that midlife reflection and examination are good, and that modern people need a sense of community, even though it is harder to obtain nowadays than at other historical times. But I realize I have been assuming that you were liberal, and you may not be liberal at all!

On the bright side, my friend Claire is probably going to join the Meetup. She got very excited when I summarized what we learned about Spinosa, although unfortunately Saturday afternoon is not the best time for her. But hopefully one of these days she will manage to come. She is my best friend, my only surviving best friend. (I once had 4, and now I am down to one. They keep dying!) She loves to read, and she is very smart.

The email that got lost seems to have been sent to a third address, so I'll stick to the 2 you just gave me from now on.

With tentative love,

Wow, you like to raise BIG issues without warning! Over my lifetime I've had many different views of and interests in politics. My main problem with politics is that it has no basis in foundational ideas which allow people to have rational discussions. The simplest example that I can think of is that the word "liberal", which arose during the Enlightenment, comes from the word "freedom" which these days is advocated and defended more by "conservatives". ( talks about this.)

Political words change radically over the decades and for that reason I simply don't like to use them. I don't like poorly defined words like "God" and "philosophy" either. I study the history of ideas as part of my search for a better dictionary of human nature so that I can learn and teach in a way that is permanent and not transitory. In the book club I try to discourage discussion of politics. I'm sorry if I let it go on too long Saturday. There are plenty of Meetups about modern politics for those who think this important. I don't.

I think about all I could say about politics is that I believe we can move slowly toward a world of peace and justice for all mankind, where everybody enjoys freedom and security both but whose endpoints must be left to future generations to sense and pursue. I like the idea of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," but I hate dictators and demigods who use good ideas to bolster sinister plots against humanity. Since these are hardly original sentiments, I'm happy to delegate the efforts to achieve them to the millions of people who share them. I also delegate to others my interest in animal welfare. I did play a major role in the gay liberation movement for decades, until it became mainstream and trivialized. I often say that each of us has a different path to walk and different contributions to make, that it's not a song, but a sympathy. I believe that what Archimedes taught us about levers is true in the historical realm as well, so I believe my best contribution lies not in signing on to a mass movement led by others, but in finding my own unique contribution to make that most people may not even feel a need for yet. (Think and thermodynamics.)

Am I against Medicare and government regulation? I wouldn't be alive today without either. My medical bills have skyrocketed in recent years yet I haven't paid a penny to get the care I needed. Big corporations would be even more predatory than they are without government regulations to keep them in check. Big Pharma would kill even more of us in the name of profits.

What I'd like to stress to you, though, is that this is a group for us to care about and learn from one another. My social contract with new people is, "You teach me everything you've learned in your life that I've so far failed to, and in return I'll teach you everything I've learned in my life that you've so far failed to." When both people decide to be honest, this is easier to do than you might imagine. That people's political affiliations tend to rigidify, that they think snarling debates, ad hominem arguments, and blatantly deceptive rhetoric are useful tools in helping others find the truth, tells me that politics is a dishonest and corrupt game and that these dogmatic affiliations do not conform to reality, which constantly confronts us with new problems and obstacles which couldn't, even theoretically, be understood by experiences which excluded them.

Please encourage Claire to contact me either by email or phone. I'm pretty sure we can fit her first Meetup into a schedule that works for all of us.

I love you, Ann.

That's a very satisfactory answer!

I guess I was nervous because I've had some peculiar interactions with Libertarians over the past few years. When Fred & I spend long stretches in the country, he's usually happily building things, but I get starved for intellectual discussion and end up talking to all kinds of people on Facebook. I've reconnected with childhood friends, met interesting environmentalists from different places in the US and even in foreign countries, and of course I've had some weird interactions, like talking to a Chinese Eco villager who got mad at me when I said that small privately owned businesses could sometimes be beneficial. But the Libertarians usually like me at first, because I seem logical, and then get furious when they realize that I am not going to be converted to Libertarianism. Open-minded I may be, but I am not going to start blaming the poor for their poverty, accept private property as the solution to everything, or assume that any complex problem has a single simple solution.

I have noticed myself the peculiar way that liberal and conservative seem to be switching in modern usage. I see myself as a defender of the natural world, which should make me "conservative," but instead most environmentalists have "liberal" politics, while modern "conservatives" are pushing the rapid destruction of the natural world by capitalism. To me that seems to be a radical agenda.

I love your social contract with new people, and I love you.

I am going to say yes on the Meetup for the book club, but I won't actually be coming on Saturday. I am up in the Catskills, where I will be spending most of the summer, and this week I'll be busy planting potatoes, fertilizing my fruit trees, and entertaining some friends. (How did a city girl end up living this life? It started when I decided I had to help my husband fulfill his dream of building a house with his own hands)

In June, I will definitely be back from June 18 until June 20, so I'll be very happy if you all can schedule the next Meetup for June 20. Any topic is good!

Claire joined the Meetup, but she'll probably wait to come until we can both come to the same meeting, which probably won't happen until July or August..

I'll also be in the city sometime next week, because I'm hosting Dick's Memorial on May 30. I'm looking forward to it; I'm pulling people together from his elementary school, from the High School of Music and Art, which he attended, from his family and from our neighborhood, so it's going to be a very diverse crowd.

To jump into another fraught topic, how is your health, Dean? Are they keeping you stable? How much time do I have to get to know you?

Affectionately yours,

Thanks for RSVP'ing. Even if you don't show up, this will encourage other women to try the waters. I don't want the book club to suffer from the broken symmetry problem that the Center and so many other organizations faced. Do you remember the scene in Jurassic Park where the expert in chaos theory puts a drop of water on the female paleontologist's wrist and asks her to predict in which way it will roll off? The point is that after the first tiny jolt from the jeep gets the drop to slide in one direction or the other, gravity will pull the drop downhill until it lies at the bottom of a topological valley. After that happens there's no way for it to find its way to the top of her wrist anymore.

I wanted the Center to be for everyone, but since Paul's students were mostly gay men we started out 50% gay men, 40% gay women and 10% straights. After a few months we were 70% gay men, 30% gay women and no straights. So, okay, we became a "gay lib" center and declared ourselves such. After a year, though, we were 90% gay men and 10% gay women. By then gay women were telling their friends, "That's a center for gay men," and very few women ever gave us a try. I refused to advertise only to gay men though. I didn't have to. Only gay men came.

When I was 10, I had rheumatic fever and stayed in a hospital for a month. When I got out, my baby doctor told me two things: 1) Don't ever participate in sports or other kinds of vigorous activity, and 2) Don't worry about any damage your heart may have suffered because you'll live well into your forties.

Living a quiet life led me to spend more time in the library becoming the geek that I am. And knowing that I had only a few more decades to live led me to rule out careers like becoming a doctor. In retrospect, I feel I was lucky to suffer both blows to my aspirations. We have enough sports "heroes", and we certainly have more than enough doctors.

Nobody knows how much longer I have. They didn't know when I was 10 and they don't know now. My doctors don't like to make predictions because they hate being wrong.

I got serious about weight loss 10 to 15 years ago and interviewed all the top surgeons in Manhattan who specialized in bariatric procedures. I learned a lot about nutrition and was soon on track to getting a "Micropouch" operation by Dr. James Sapala, the top dog of this pack. When I did well meeting his pre-operation weight loss requirements, he decided that I should not risk surgery but just keep losing weight through a better diet.

But this has not been easy. Having grown up with people who thought a balanced meal meant children should always have a donut after dinner, I knew that pizza, ice cream and Chinese food were the best food available to Americans. No doctor ever asked me anything about my diet, and now at the age of 68 I find it extremely difficult to fight a lifetime of what were in retrospect bad eating habits.

Rachel has been a saint in insisting that I follow her dietary rules. In the first six months she was here, my weight plummeted from 250 to 200 pounds. But it has slowly crept up again, perhaps because atrial fibrillation and severe pulmonary hypertension makes it difficult for my heart to pump oxygenated blood to my muscles. I start gasping for air whenever I start walking around.

On the other hand, I'm no fan of an artificially prolonged life. Longevity has its place, as Martin Luther King said, but I'm no more worried than he was at the end. I feel I've lived a good life and have made about as much a contribution as I was able to. I think primitive peoples get it right when they say, "This is a good day to die."

Yet in another sense I don't think people die at all. Here's why:

My death will be hard on Rachel. Please stand by her when that awful moment comes. And the answer to your question is, you will have exactly as much time to get to know me as you can afford to give.

I'll try to get John Hetland to schedule our next meeting for June 20.

The broken symmetry problem is interesting. What comes up in teaching ESL, which is similar, is that the students organize themselves according to language background. All the Russians sit together, all the Chinese sit together, all the Colombians sit together. Usually that is exactly the opposite of what you want, because they help each other more effectively during peer editing if they have different language backgrounds. So you have to break them up, and we also break them up according to skin color, when possible. Usually after initial resistance, they start forming all kinds of interesting friendships. If you give them the right essay topics, they also learn about each other's cultures. But as teachers we have a captive population, which you never had in the Center.

I'm no fan of an artificially prolonged life either, but I don't want to lose you in the near term. Lately there have been a slew of articles in the NYT about the importance of exercise, even tiny bits of exercise. Sitting for long periods of time is harmful, but breaking it up for a short walk, about 2 minutes of walking for every 58 minutes of sitting, cancels out the risk. So please keep trying to walk. Even a slow walk, even 1 minute, has got to be helpful.

I read a lot about diet, but I don't think the "experts" have solved it yet. They keep expecting that there will be one right diet for everyone, whereas people are very different. Also, our food production techniques keep changing and some nutrients that were once common are now hard to get. There are, in my reading, 2 radically different dietary approaches to reversing systemic disease. If you have been trying a low-fat vegetarian diet, and it has stopped working, you might consider switching to Atkins or a Paleolithic diet for a while. These high-protein, high-fat diets are beneficial for some people. If you are curious, I will get you more information. I know someone who was successful with that approach.

I will do my best to stand by Rachel. I don't know her very well yet, but I have some idea what she is going through, because Fred has struggled through 3 major surgeries (prostate cancer, mitral valve repair, aorta repair). We were very lucky in that everything was fixable, and he's healthy now. As for me, I was very calm and strong during the first crisis, but by the third one, the stress and anxiety had worn me down. Fortunately, I had some supportive friends in Jackson Heights by then.

Rachel does her best to prevent me from sitting at my desk for too long. She would like it if I got up every 15 minutes, and I try to do this. The problem is that if I'm writing something important I get totally inspired and don't tolerate any interruptions milder than an earthquake. The idea of helping mankind learn what I've learned, even though I will never be thanked, even if I may be quickly forgotten like so many other well-meaning folks have been, is a goal infinitely more important to me than living a few more weeks.

Every life partner always wonders why their "good ideas" are not immediately taken up with fervor by their better half. The problem here is not obvious. Partners may be very close yet have very different goals for their relationship. Max has goals for Minnie, and she has goals for him. Minnie has goals for herself, and likewise for Max. These four goals, which evolved through different life histories, don't automatically come into full alignment no matter how hard we might wish them to. Actually, they never do. The question is always "How much alignment is good enough for me to be happy with this person?"

Rachel wants me to live longer. This is entirely appropriate, since we haven't been together long. But I've always had contempt for people who value longevity over creativity. That's why I couldn't stand the "health nuts" who infested the East Village in the 70's. I was running a social center based on the goal of personal growth. They were completely blind to the idea of that they could grow in any psychological sense, yet they were quite smug about how important it was to live a little longer than the people around them.

Longevity has its place, as Martin Luther King said. But for me it doesn't override creativity. I would rather live a shorter life and leave something of importance to mankind, as Paul Rosenfels did. He predicted, for example, that his brother Walter would outlive him because Paul had taken on more creative stress in his life, whereas Walter more or less sat out the fight for humanity and tended to his own little garden. This is also why Paul had contempt for the "nest featherers" at the Center and once said to me that I was the only one willing to give up enough "here and now" gluttony for the sake of helping to make the world a better place.

Paul made a distinction between "oppressive stress" and "creative stress". The first is caused by everything the human race would simply be better without, things like poverty, disease, ignorance and war. The second is caused by one's decision to do something about these things. Creative dissatisfaction is also in the personalities of great scientists who tackle big problems. I don't care that much for people who are a little too happy with themselves and totally nonchalant about all the evils around them.

It was Rachel who finally made it clear to me that, as our understanding of nutrition leaves the world of trendy pop-fads, good nutrition doesn't conflict with but actually helps us live a creative life. Since I'm quite stoical in nature, today I'm willing to give up anything that doesn't impair my creative life. Food restrictions don't do that. But I still resist getting up and getting down all day long because that certainly impairs my ability to focus on what I'm trying to express in my writing. I'm trying to take a walk every day, though, or at least move heavy objects.

Evolution is not restricted to species, it turns out. and his have been working on the evolution that all "complex adaptive systems" undergo. After all, computers evolve, right? And so does tooth-paste. Murray thinks physical laws evolved in the early universe and only now are rigid. Rachel and I went to an interesting lecture last year where a female researcher said that, since people have different histories, their bodies evolve differently. The idea of each body adapting over time to different climates and different diets sounds reasonable to me. It would explain why Zulu warriors thrive on cow blood and Eskimos thrive on blubber. It might also explain why a lifetime of bad eating habits is so hard to change. Maybe after the body has spent half a century developing mechanisms to neutralize bad food, it just doesn't want to evolve any more. Psychological rigidity is similarly a trait of old people in any culture.

Dr. Sapala favored the Atkins diet, which I followed until he discovered protein in my urine after which he recommended salads. I have the Paleolithic diet book but I haven't read much of it. I do believe in "eating less and exercising more", but I'm simply not qualified to evaluate diets. Nowadays I believe in the Bartlett Diet. You should talk with Rachel about nutrition. You guys probably have lots and lots of information to share.

I thought it might interest you to know that in 1999 I tried to correspond with Steve Z., who I hadn't seen in 20 years. He sent me a bitter, whining letter accusing me of having ruined his life by persecuting him when we were at the Bronx High School of Science, and that this trauma was why he had never accomplished anything in his life and still had to see a shrink. This was my response:

Steve never wrote back.

It's an interesting letter, but I'm not especially surprised that Steve didn't answer it. My intuition is that Steve needs to be flattered a bit before he'll deal with anything, and there's so much in that letter that he could take offense at it.

As far as explaining how you got involved with Paul, you handled it beautifully, but Steve might not understand if he's never had a transformative relationship with a mentor. How long did your sexual involvement with Paul last? I believe there are 2 kinds of significant relationships, transformative relationships that can be brief but are still extremely important, and long-term relationships that are important in a different way. Some of the things you see in psychological terms I tend to see in spiritual terms. I picture Paul more as a powerful spiritual force, like Gurdjieff or Jesus, who could heal people just by being around them, rather than as a scientist.

I may be totally wrong about this, and sometimes I am overly creative, but that's what I'm visualizing.

Voltaire once said, "Once a philosopher, twice a pederast." By that he was referring, of course, to homosexual activity. I'm no pederast, but I plead guilty to one homosexual relationship. It taught me a lot about philosophy.

I believe that Paul's message about homosexuality — that it could be a liberating force for mankind as well as for creative individuals — is well taken once you understand his reasoning. On the other hand, his appetite for compulsive homosexual activity, even if it was finally monogamous, always seemed unhealthy for him and a burden to me. It took me three years to find the courage to say, "Enough." Some day I will say more about that.

The important thing is that Newton's Principia Mathematica works. We don't need to condemn the decades he wasted in Alchemy or the Book of Revelation or the claim he made at the end of his life that the accomplishment of which he was most proud was having avoided sex.

Your well-named model of transformative relationships reminded me that the basic problem in founding a science of human nature is vocabulary. As Paul said,

You're on the right track in your terminology, but Paul would said it differently. He would have made a distinction between "creative" and "adaptive" relationships. Creative relationships help you become the person you need to be. Adaptive relationships help you survive physically and preserve your mental health. To speak metaphorically, creativity is everything you do while you're awake, while adaptivity is everything you do while you're getting a good night's sleep. I found adaptive adequacy easily once I escaped my family and our academic system, so creative relationships have been paramount to me ever since. Of course, these categories are mental models that help us understand human life. In practice, relationships can include both functions, simultaneously or in phases.

Your use of the words "spiritual" and "healing" is too atavistic ever to have appealed to Paul. "Spiritual" is one of those weasel words that implies that there is a spirit world. "Healing" is also a loaded term since it implies we're all damaged goods who need to be saved. Born-again religious terms are always used to sell us things we don't need. I prefer "psychological" or simply "psychic" to "spiritual", and "growth" or "development" to "healing".

In fact I believe that scientistic neologisms like psychology, sociology and anthropology have done more to confuse than to educate. Their demarcations have nothing to do with the innate structure of the world and more with the mind of a three-year-old, and demonstrate the incompetence of 19th-century reductionism to create a viable synthesis. What we need is what David Hume called "a science of human nature". It took a few centuries for a mind capable to formulating its basic principles to arrive, but it was well worth waiting for.

We are all bombarded every day with stale, polluted and outdated vocabularies, crowding around us desperately struggling to avoid extinction. You might enjoy looking at the one I've tinkered together:

That first paragraph is so funny! I enjoy your writing so much!

Yes, imprecise vocabulary can be a big problem, and I appreciate the attention that you and Paul have paid to developing more precise vocabulary, although the dictionary link is pretty inscrutable to me at this time. I understand that if I talk of spiritual or mystical experiences, it turns a lot of people off. On the other hand, that is how I understand some of my experiences, and the people who get angry at anyone's having a spiritual or intuitive side seem limited to me.

A lot of the things I like are "atavistic." I was in a coven for a while, and I did rituals for people who asked, including a pretty spectacular exorcism. I do something called Shamanic Drumming, in which one goes into trance to the beat of a drum. I've been to an event called Ancient Wisdom, in which elders from different traditions give talks and workshops. Two years ago we had an African priestess, a Tibetan rinpoche, and Chief Oren Lyons. I attend fire circles hosted by some of my country neighbors, who were trained by the Huichole Indians in Mexico. It's not that I think the old cultures were uniformly better, but rather that each cultural change brings both benefits and losses. For me, I'm sure I could get similar effects from a biofeedback machine to what we get in drumming, but I prefer the drumming circle because it provides a richer, more sensual, more companionable experience. More traditional cultures are better than modern culture in providing a sense of community, I think.

It's so funny that you're telling me how Paul disapproved of describing things as "psychic" or "spiritual" or "healing" just as I'm reading your interview with his dear Laurie Bell, who's so completely immersed in all that. You seemed to relate to her back in 1990, but perhaps you've changed. I mostly base my life on science, but I need the other things for warmth, color, relaxation.

Oh, I did get one thing out of the dictionary. If most of the famous psychological thinkers, including Paul, have been feminine, then that does start to explain why you were so important to Paul intellectually. He really needed a smart, articulate masculine to help him figure out that side of it, and how to express it.

It still seems very strange to me that polarity lumps introspective thinkers and warm emotional types together, as feminines. To me they seem very different. So my friend Ron, who's warm and friendly and gregarious and talks a lot about love, what would he be? Does polarity say you can't have extroversion and heart-centered-ness together in one healthy person?

And what does the term "seduced," which comes up in your book, mean? What is a "seduced masculine"? What is a "seduced feminine"?

Your own story, as told obliquely in the book, is fascinating. Your repressed father, obsessed with homosexuality, gave you a big push in that direction, as if it was only through a homosexual relationship that you could understand him or be close to him or see what he might have been. It reminds me of how my father's first wife, Ruth, used to send their daughters off to the first day of school with the admonition to report back on their teachers' looks and "what kind of titties" they had. Ruth was completely unrepressed and poly sexual, as far as I can tell, but her histrionics wore my dad out.

I enjoyed watching the play with Rachel, but that denial of global warming science because an unknown conspiracy is fucking with the weather is more than I can deal with.

I am hopefully awaiting answers to my questions about "seduced feminine," etc., because polarity is pretty fascinating, but I'm bogged down for now. I can see that my mom was masculine & my dad fem, for example, but it's much harder to evaluate people like my friend Ron S., whom I've never seen in a mated relationship.

But my quick question is about Laurence Sterne's which I downloaded after the last discussion I attended, when Larry explained that it was satirizing some philosophical ideas of its time. Now I can't remember which philosopher it was satirizing. Do you remember? I want to appreciate the jokes as I read.

Yesterday I hosted a totally secular memorial for Dick, which his executor cousin kindly paid for. We ate some cake (his favorite breakfast), shared memories in the garden where he used to walk or sleep with his cat, and ate Peruvian food (one of his favorite dinners). I thought it was important to provide some closure for the survivors, since he had very separated friend circles, and it was actually wonderful. We got childhood friends, high school friends, friends from different jobs, 4 cousins, and it was so interesting to hear different perspectives about him. Among his other interesting traits, Dick had no understanding of appropriate behavior. My friend Terri confided that he once demanded to know, after staring at her for a while, if her breasts had gotten smaller. She explained that she was wearing a different style of bra. I could easily tell stories of this kind for half an hour. My friend was brilliant, knowledgeable, loyal, and definitely a Dick!

I'm working on a suitable reply to your last letter. I love getting letters from you because they force me to be "at my best", i. e. to rise to my highest and most generous self, and to reply from that plateau.

My short term memory sucks and, honestly, I don't remember what Larry said about Tristam Shandy. Maybe the novel simply satirizes the naive optimism of The Enlightenment? Similarly to what Aristophanes did with Socrates?

By the way, the "good news" about having a crap memory is that every day seems new and original. I'm far more interested in my life now than I was when I was entrapped in a maze of haunting memories.

The world is full of Dicks. We're all Dicks to some extent. The trick is to forgive the bad and embrace the good. I believe we all deserve at least that much from our friends. You're an extremely generous person, Ann.

Aw gee, thanks!

That's interesting, about poor short term memory. Since a few people I know have poor short term memory, I have a lot of experience working around it, and I know that it can easily coexist with high intelligence. It seems to force a certain creativity.

I had great short term memory for most of my life, but it's starting to slip. Maybe I'll post my question in the Meetup website and see if Larry wants to expound

Let's think about some of the serious issues you've raised, even if some are just irritations resulting either from different vocabularies, or simply the innate limitations of language to convey a complete picture of what the speaker is thinking.

As a general rule, I'd say that when you tell a hot dog vendor "One with onions, please. To go.", she knows everything she needs to know about what's in your mind. But when people say anything of an even partially abstract nature, as you and I consistently attempt to do, only about 60% gets across in any one sentence. (And I think I almost understand about 60% of that claim!) That's why I tend to speak in paragraphs and resist being cut-off mid-stream.

We don't, after all, emit isolated, brittle sentences as those hostile aliens in 1950's sci-fi flix always did. We have friendly conversations in which quite a few sentences begin with, "Does that make sense?" or "Do you mean ?" It's important to resist the suggestion that in this process we're "compromising". On the contrary, we're bridge-building in order for information traffic to go both ways. Unlike compromises, when you're building a bridge, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

Evolution has given us built-in capacities for acquiring new knowledge and new skills, both at the species level and in the life of each individual, that lower animals lack. We can't fly like birds, but our species has made machines that fly better than birds and which don't mind taking us along for the ride. None of us are telepathic, yet we can each continue any conversation until a reasonable facsimile of mind-melding snaps into place.

You think that when you talk of spiritual or mystical experiences it turns me off. That tells me that I didn't express myself clearly. I understand and approve of what you mean by these words, as I do of Laurie's use of them. I simply think, and tried to say, that you'd be clearer if you avoided lumping yourself in with people who believe either in the "spirit world" or that we are all damaged and need to be "healed". (Compare the latter with "original sin".)

I also understand and approve of your drumming and dancing naked on a bar. (Next time, though, invite me to the show!) Paul divides our lives into four areas: creativity, adaptation, sex and celebration, and fun and pleasure. Fun and pleasure sources differ widely between individuals and need not be judged by me or anyone else. I enjoy learning about nutty hobbies but don't consider them diagnostic. I like dinosaurs, for instance, while Rachel likes birds. (BIRDS?!?)

Also, you won't need to intuit unexpressed anger in my personality. You'll be the first one to know if I ever get angry with you. But it will happen only if I see you harming yourself or others. All other forms of dissonance will be treated as problems or obstacles which, especially in your case, deserve my full attention. Anger and hatred simply have no part to play either in solving scientific problems or in overcoming engineering obstacles, and they only have minor applications in our daily adaptive lives.

You ask, "Does polarity say you can't have extroversion and heart-centered-ness together in one healthy person?"

said, "The map is not the territory." Are you asking about Paul's insights or the situation-normal-all-fucked-up world we live in? Personal histories vary widely from person to person and should be discussed in context. No science makes predictions that sound like tea-leaf-reading. A science abstracts data as far as it can so that a general framework for future discoveries becomes possible. Examine the difference between Darwinism and Marxism, for example. To indulge in the delicious pleasure of quoting myself, I will now mention with no little fanfare that I wrote the following in my introduction to Paul's last book: In the same way that a finite series of integers can be generated by any number of mathematical functions, any finite set of data can be explained by a wide variety of theories. The test of a theory is not whether it explains the data — phlogiston and epicycles do that well enough — but whether its explanation leads to new questions which themselves are falsifiable and lead recursively to new truth. This fertility is demonstrated brilliantly by Darwinian science, for example, the repercussions of which have brought entire new continents of scientific inquiry into view, and not at all by Marxian pseudo-science, which to this day requires a smug army of state-planned economists to prop up.

You ask, "What does the term 'seduced,' which comes up in your book, mean? What is a 'seduced masculine'? What is a 'seduced feminine'?"

In order for Paul to keep distinct the two personality types he was modelling, he found it useful to use distinct terms for their problems as well as their "virtues" (he called them "resources"). In this case, he selected the terms "seduced masculine" and "intimidated feminine". Note that this structure simplifies communication since "seduced" means "seduced masculine" and "intimidated" means "intimidated feminine."

A seduced masculine is one who has been taught not to trust his power instincts, but instead to be "good" as society requires. An intimidated feminine is one who has been taught not to trust his love instincts, but instead to be "dutiful" as the state demands.

A New Dictionary of Human Nature is slightly more precise: Over-feeling state in a masculine caused by empathizing with socially supported passivity. Over-active state in a feminine caused by identifying with socially supported aggression.

Your understandable irritation with Rachel reminded me that once said, "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." In the 2010 BBC version of "Sherlock", Inspector Lestrade says of him, "Sherlock is a great man. Some day he may even be a good man." Rachel is both a genius and a great man. (Forgive the atavistic reference to species rather than to gender!)

You and I have grown up in the greatest city in the world, cherishing the highest values than mankind has yet conceived. So it's no wonder if, in our placid contentment, we expect those worthy of our friendship to be like us in their lifestyle, political opinions and social conventions. Unfortunately, this planet is bigger than just the city we grew up in. The really big issues facing mankind go far beyond those of political wrangling and social conformity.

To appreciate Rachel's genius and greatness you and I have to forgo the assumptions we make about what worthy people look like. Rachel comes from a completely different background than you and I do. To begin with, until the fall of the Berlin Wall she was a fervent communist. She marched in their parades, she won awards for her angry diatribes extolling the Communist Party and Marxism-Leninism. It took genius to lift herself up by her bootstraps and become the completely different person she is today. As a result she has an intimate understanding of "transformative" experiences and is the very last person ever to judge someone because of their current indoctrination.

Rachel and I never ask "where a person's at" when we consider inviting them into our circle. All students are ignorant, after all, until they become our teachers. We only care where they've been and where they're going. Are they a finished product, or are they capable of acquiring new insights and skills?

But no life is sanitary, even for those who pursue their growth whole-heartedly. We all have bruises and scars of battles we couldn't avoid. Although symptoms of these are carefully excised from the textbooks we write and the speeches we give, they leak out in spontaneous radio and television interviews. (I no longer read textbooks or listen to speeches!)

Rachel's transformation was especially violent, painful, and rife with side effects. For example, after escaping the academic system she had finally become disgusted with, she spent 15 years in a self-imposed "monastic retreat" (Paul's term) just to cleanse herself of her childhood brainwashing. As a feminine, she became withdrawn and, due to her increasingly phobic nature, disinterested in new experiences. To develop a new view of life, she spent years cherry-picking from the internet the opinions of those who were, or whom she thought were, still in the real world. Unfortunately, with her limited experience of any world larger than the doll house she'd grown up in, she had no "sense of smell" for narratives that were credible vs. those that were bullshit. Paranoid people can use the internet to produce and consume conspiracy theories that soothe their feelings of inferiority. After all, if you're powerless to fight the evil masterminds in this world, it's not your fault if you tend to be clumsy in your personal relationships. It's always someone else's fault.

Paul used to love Times Square because of "all the lost souls" he could aspire to help. I always rescue abandoned kittens who need a dish of cream. Rachel specializes in really, really weird people like me. When I found her she had already conducted an independent search for a science of human nature, and had read everything Paul had ever written — the only person in the world ever to have done so, as far as I know. Unfortunately, she still bore the scars of her long retreat from reality. As an experiential person, I can tell you that she still has problems letting reality in and letting her preconceived notions out. Also, New York City is totally over-stimulating to someone who grew up in a peaceful suburb of East Germany. She loves her new life, but she still has years of catching up to do.

Paul used to tell me that some of his students weren't getting anywhere because they "didn't have interesting problems." At the end of the day, you can help Rachel catch up, and Rachel can help you transform. You have very interesting problems, indeed. I encourage both of you to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities these problems offer you.

Let's clear up one thing, at least. I didn't think that you were angry about my having a spiritual side. I didn't think that you were angry about anything! I think that you have warm feelings towards me and are invested in our friendship. I was talking about a group of people, let's call them militant atheists, who attack spiritual people, and no, I can't imagine you doing that, because you seem benevolent, and besides, it doesn't accomplish much. I thought you were saying that some people, not you, would lump me in with the spiritual crowd and dismiss me. It made me think of one particular person (Luke) who was a libertarian and a militant atheist, with whom I had a brief friendship, now over. You did seem to be saying that Paul disapproved of atavistic or New Age stuff, and that struck me as humorous in the context of the interview with Laurie Bell, but I haven't been assuming that your beliefs are identical with Paul's. Even if they were at one time, they may have changed. Anyway, I thought I should let you know that I like atavistic things, in the interests of full disclosure, but although I'm attracted to those things, I don't stray all that far from science. For example, although I am confident that I have had certain precognitive experiences, I don't think precognition is reliable enough for me to put a lot of time into developing or refining it.

I have been meeting lots of strange people on Facebook, and to me it's fascinating to see all the belief systems out there. Some people are highly atavistic! I would like to move backwards in time a little bit, to get food from a family farm or swim in an unpolluted ocean, but I have met people who feel that mankind went wrong back when we domesticated animals, or even when we started agriculture, and that only primitive people had the capacity to live in harmony with nature. Fred loves to refer to that scene in Woody Allen's when the hero gets his wish to go back to Hemingway's Paris, where he meets a group of artists who are longing to go backwards to the Belle Epoch, et cetera. Basically, everybody thinks somebody else had it better.

I enjoyed the quote from your introduction to Paul's last book, and I think it also explains why I dislike conspiracy theories. They don't lead to interesting questions, and you can never disprove them! But you didn't answer my question, probably because it wasn't clear enough. I am trying to use polarity to type the people I know. That is how I play with any new theory of personality, to see if it's useful to me. And I can type lots of people as masculine or feminine, but I am having trouble with one particular type, which we call 2 in the Enneagram, and which is roughly equivalent to Extroverted Feeling Type in Jung. These people live to serve, to help, or to be in love. It's not my favorite type, so I don't know a ton of them. But my friend Ron Schneebaum is both a 2 and someone I admire, so I was trying to figure out if he would be masculine or feminine. I am trying to determine if 2's are always masculine or always feminine or if they can be either. Ron is someone I went to elementary school with, we recently became friends on Facebook, and he visited me and Fred in the country. He is a pediatrician, but he is working on writing now, and I sometimes edit things for him. I am looking at his book now, and well, I was wrong about everything! He's not a 2, he's probably a 7, and he's probably masculine. He writes a lot about love, but he always pairs it with a more manly concept like joy or exhilaration. I wonder if he isn't working off his own version of polarity. He's writing a blog called , for parents, and again, he's pairing a masculine concept (discipline) with a feminine one (the heart). By the way, I ditched Luke when he insulted Ron on my Facebook wall, so there's a slim connection between them. Ron wasn't upset when Luke insulted him (since Ron is a mature, manly man?), but I didn't want Luke around anymore. Also, Ron is probably masculine because he and Fred related in a pretty rollicking way, cracking joke after joke, when we were all together, and I don't think Fred would relate that way to a feminine. Am I analyzing these things in a reasonable way, or is my understanding too superficial for me to go on?

Thanks for defining seduced masculine and intimidated feminine. You and your interviewees were using those terms in We Knew Paul, and I couldn't follow the conversation. My other problem, after really liking the first half of the book, was that I gradually came to realize that I was "the enemy," one of those awful parents who encourage their children to attend college. (I am saying this tongue in cheek; I know I am not really "the enemy.") However, I really was disturbed by the conversation about the person who committed suicide. There are two sides to all this. Brilliant Paul certainly was, but why did he really decide to work outside any academic or professional framework and separate all his students from their families? Was it because it is impossible to be creative and maintain any academic or professional affiliation? Or was it rather because he wanted to have unfettered sex with his students? As a parent, I would be not only devastated, but also furious, if my kid broke off all ties with me, had sex with his therapist/counselor, and then went into a depression and committed suicide. There is a certain protection for everyone in following the norms. These may all be obvious thoughts, but they didn't really come to the forefront of my mind until your interviewee (whose name I forget) explained how he didn't feel at all responsible for the suicide of his client. Well, at any rate, you are in good company as an author whose book I am putting down for a while. I put down the fascinating book, by right after one of the main characters, a teenager, was murdered. (Boo set up residence in a horrible Indian squatters' village in a garbage dump in order to write the book, which is nonfiction.)

Fred and I also love the 2010 BBC Sherlock.

Dean, I don't see myself as having interesting problems that you and Rachel can help me transform out of. I am pretty happy with who I am. I am sad about the destruction of the biosphere, but that's a pretty rational response. I had a hard time deciding what to do for the next phase of my life, but I think I'm going to like working with CCL. I did the things I wanted to do, like have a child, publish a book, and build a house. I have loved teaching, and my students say very nice things about me, but I find I can have similar experiences in book clubs, of participating in interesting discussions. Fred & I are pretty thrilled to be healthy and alive, after his 3 brushes with death. And my daughter is a fascinating, creative person, and she seems to love me and her dad in spite of that!

Are you sure you want to change me? Yes, your insight can help me with various projects, and yes, my presence can enrich your group, but I'm not convinced that I need to be transformed. If you are thinking that I have low self-esteem, I don't! I tend to be slow to defend myself and quick to defend others, but I know my worth.

I think I'll write about Rachel in another letter. Your description of her brilliance and background is quite compelling.

I can see that Rachel is brilliant, a fine writer, an ingenious collaborator, and I am very happy that she loves you so much and is trying to take good care of you. If she fails to take excellent care of you, I expect that is your fault and not hers. The story of Rachel's retreat reminds me of my favorite Enneagram teacher, Don Riso. Don was a homosexual Jesuit and learned a short version of the Enneagram as a Jesuit, because they use it in training. When he left the order in the 1970s, he spent 12 years developing his own ideas on the subject, mostly in isolation. When he published his first book in the 1980s, he soon developed his own following and published several other books, but he showed a lot of courage and determination in first working it out all by himself. I really admire these quirky, focused people. Don is a 4 on the Enneagram, and perhaps Rachel is too.

But it is a problem that she and I have what might be considered conflicting obsessions. Her delusion is that no global warming is happening. My delusion, according to many people, is imagining that I can do anything to slow it down. I can understand why people deny scary science, and some of my other friends have fallen prey to various conspiracy theories. But it's very hard for me not to argue with them, because these conspiracy theories are harmful. They are destroying people's faith in not only government, but science. I wonder if they start out as Soviet propaganda, actually, which would make it ironic that they caught Rachel. But my main problem is that Rachel got pretty rude with me. How can I help her catch up if she regards me as a slavish follower of the mass media, to be held at bay with clever-sounding put-downs? Of course we can simply limit all conversation to dead playwrights and philosophers, but that keeps me from talking about my experiences and my passion. And I do resent being treated like a credulous idiot, when I have been teaching college students how to evaluate sources for 26 years. I know how to evaluate sources if I know anything.

I don't find you all that weird, Dean. I find it really interesting that you transformed yourself from a morose, rough teenager into an interesting, articulate man with good leadership abilities, and I like to hear about how that happened. But I don't understand the need for constant growth that Paul's followers express. I agree with Jung, who thought a person needed at least one good self-examination to keep from turning into a caricature in old age. I have had two pretty good self-examinations, and I think I avoided turning into a caricature. But constant growth? Why?

I'll be there for the June 20 meeting of the Enlightenment Book Club, and I can hang out with you (or you and Rachel) for a while afterwards if you have the energy for that. Then on June 21, I take a train to DC to start lobbying for carbon fee & dividend. "Why?" asked Rachel, "to make Al Gore even richer?" I'm doing it for Rachel, for my beautiful daughter April, and for all the other young people. I personally probably won't be alive when the really bad effects of climate change kick in. I'm proud of myself and I hope you at least wish me good luck. I'm also really happy and excited. I have met a couple of CCL people already, and they are smart and well-informed. It's a very political group, and in my old age I am starting to find politics fascinating. CCL people don't look at things exactly the way I have been looking at them. For example, an environmentally sensitive Republican is worth more than an environmentally sensitive Democrat, because the carbon fee legislation has to be introduced by a Republican, and very few of them are environmentally sensitive, so far.

Affectionately yours,

Thanks for you two new letters, Ann. I'll think about them for a few days and then write back.

I'm glad you're coming to the next book club meeting.

I'll try to be brief, so I don't deluge you with letters. I just finished 3 hours of webinars for CCL, and they emphasize that we need to learn to keep our cool, when lobbying, even with people who may try to infuriate us, for sport. They say that most members of Congress are charming, even charismatic, but a younger or overworked staffer may sometimes try to goad us with phrases like "so-called global warming," and it's important not to bite, but to move on to possible common ground. So perhaps I need to view my interactions with Rachel as valuable practice for handling these situations!

I couldn't agree more. That's why diplomacy is such an important aspect of international politics. It's the main thing that has saved mankind from thermonuclear war.

I'm back from DC, and I had a great time lobbying! Of course, now I'm reading the news again, and I see that possibly 2 million people have died from the heat wave in India and Pakistan, and I realize how very little time we have to get the climate back under control. Oh well, I do believe I am doing what I can.

I want a letter from you; let me propose that you focus on explaining how you came to think that growth should be a continual process, rather than something done through periodic retreats. I think Jung felt you only needed to examine your life once or twice, in order to keep from becoming a caricature. I remember writing to Anna Garden when I was going to a lot of feminist spiritual workshops, and she said that she spaced her workshops out, because each one changed her, and she needed time to integrate that change. I immediately decided that she was right and started spacing mine out more. So that's where I'm coming from, but I'm very curious about how you developed your different point of view.

Another wonderful letter. Yes, I will respond to all your letters. In fact, I've set aside all day Saturday to respond in full.

Rachel and I are finding it harder than we'd expected to clean out her office so she can be productive again. (It's a long story.) So we try to stifle our creative impulses during the week, and take a big breath on Saturday.

Till then . . .

OK, that's good news! And there's less bad news in that I just rechecked my figures, and it's more like 2000 dead in this heat wave, not 2 million. Wandering around in 95 degree weather in DC for 3 days has addled my brain a bit. It's a whole different culture, in terms of temperature. Everything is so severely air conditioned that you always need a sweater or jacket to wear indoors, but you have to remember to take it off before you go outside, or you'll dissolve into a puddle of sweat.

Say hi to Rachel from me, and good luck with the cleaning!

In case you're really, really bored, you might enjoy reading this proposal I wrote for CHESS.COM:

For at least a century, chess has had several variants. The most popular is live chess, where opponents sit down at a table and duke it out in "real time". Second most popular is "postal chess", where opponents send moves to one another on postcards, thereby ensuring that each can take a few days to think about any move. To me, the first resembles a sport since there is time pressure and bystanders, and you need to rely more on sheer instinct rather than whatever analytic thoroughness you're capable of. I have even seen fanatical aficionados use intimidating body language, like gruffly pushing their pieces almost into their opponent's square just to be annoying.

Postal chess seems more like going off into the woods to write the Great American Novel (or at least a stack of "belles lettres"). You can put as much or as little into the effort, but always at a leisurely pace conducive to thoughtfulness and the savoring of a delicious intellectual problem. The deepest mathematical proofs are developed in such atmospheres, not at Oxford debates where geeks might scribble on blackboards to the roar of inebriated fans. (Personally, I adore a third variant called "fairy chess" — but I'll let you guess why!)

I love the fact that you and I are writing letters to one another. This gives us plenty of time to think about what we're saying, to ask whether it's helpful and appropriate in context, and see if there aren't better, more succinct ways of getting to the point. Writing to you helps me understand better just what it is I think I understand — and to honestly question it. Sitting down in a restaurant and arguing would never provide these benefits — although it might offer bystanders a food fight they could take bets on.

So, yes, I've been thinking about your letters, all of them, and I'll always try to say something helpful.

Paul used to say that creativity is "as common as pig tracks". Truth and right are all over the place too. We couldn't live a day without them. I'm no academic snob. I adopt wisdom wherever I find it. I believe in the Boy Scouts' motto, "BE PREPARED", for example. And Dale Carnegie, despite being wildly popular, recommended some actually useful pointers as well, such as "Hope for the best and prepare for the worst." Even better in encapsulating the American "can do" spirit may be the books of .

All civilizations are awash in ways to think and ways to do. The special problem that I have as a student of theories of human nature is that I've had to master, or at least familiarize myself, with dozens of vocabularies, many of which are saying similar things in dissimilar words. I feel this problem acutely in our discussions here, Ann. Often you feel we're disagreeing when I think we're simply using different dialects to say identical things.

It's a great modern delusion to think that when someone speaks, we know what she means. Or that words are defined by sesselfurzers who write dictionaries. All the misconstructions you and I experience are well worth disentangling, of course, and I learn a lot from the effort. Once mankind takes care of a few minor issues like poverty, disease, ignorance, and war, this will probably be our great scientific project for, oh, say the next millennium or so (if I can be slightly spongy for second).

Did Paul disapprove of atavistic ideas? Paul didn't have time to disapprove of any ideas or any behaviors, as long as they didn't veer into the paranoid or the criminal. He once told me a funny story about an unhappy young man who came right to the point, "I like to pee on my girlfriend in the shower. How sick is that?"

All Paul said was, "If you both like it, where's the problem?"

I had a similar experience with a young gay man named Ethan who was a star psych post-grad at Ithaca. After weeks of getting to know one another, he finally said, "Dean, there's something I've been keeping secret from you, but the time has come to finally admit it. I like to wear diapers and a shower cap and suck on rubber nipples."

He was crestfallen and shocked when all I had to offer was, "What in the world has that got to do with us?"

Paul was the supreme expert on human development. He knew better than anybody that all of us, including him, go through transitional and transformational phases where we entertain odd ideas and weird habits that seem useful for the moment but which we eventually abandon. The FBI has time and time again reassured parents that when goth kids become infatuated with satanism and go off into the woods to have the kind of fun they can't have in their sterile fundamentalist communities, it's only "a phase" and a "release valve", and constitutes no actual threat to society. (See )

Children are especially vulnerable to memes that swirl through the world of ideas they share. All our idea worlds intersect like three-dimensional squiggly Venn diagrams in an overcrowded aquarium, and influence one another over time. Usually the better ideas "trickle down" and displace the worse, but you must never be impatient. This evolution happens naturally, for the simple reason that no one is ever truly served by believing falsehoods. Forcing the issue, especially on one's own children, risks resentful rebellion. I learned to hate Shakespeare and Joyce Kilmer because of bossy school-teachers. (See .)

I no longer frequent any of Meetup's atheist groups because they're stuck in the past fighting ghosts. Atheists, at least in New York, seem to be people who can't stop talking about God. Who doesn't exist. Words like atheism themselves are atavistic in the sense that they are throwbacks to a simpler time when people couldn't appreciate the complexity and subtlety of the universe we're beginning to discover and so had childishly simple belief choices. Just in the last century, we've acquired a rich variety of belief choices about God:

ATHEIST: God doesn't exist.

AGNOSTIC: I don't know if God exists.

IGTHEIST: What is this 'God' you speak of?

I prefer to focus on the really dangerous mental viruses leaking into our lives. Take Cultural Marxism, for example, which, having sucked Russia dry, is now coming to your local mall.

You're using the word "atavistic" quite incorrectly when you attach it to simple "fun and pleasure" activities like group drumming. I would even categorize your interest in precognitive experiences as a simple, fun and pleasure activity. If we all go around judging one another's simple, fun and pleasure activities, it's probably because we haven't found anything better to do with that moment. How could getting food from a family farm or swimming in a unpolluted ocean be anything but progressive, and not atavistic? Paul liked to get down to the basics, to what humans actually need to thrive, not what they're being sold by corporations and politicians. He chose to use the term "radical", which means "basic" or "simple". I see you as a radical, Ann, not as a throwback. We're going to need to disentangle this issue more. Words are important.

All good teachers learn sooner than later that you cannot teach what a student doesn't want to learn. Paul didn't give spontaneous lectures about all the incredible insights he had discovered, for example. That would have been as pointless as teaching entomology to ants. Instead he waited for his students to expose the doubt or distress in them that had brought them into his office in the first place. Only then would he ask specific questions (think Sherlock Holmes) and only after that would he offer tentative suggestions on how to think about the problem. If was perfectly okay if all they had to say was, "I'll have to think about that." In fact, one of the best ways to know if what you taught had been learned is when the student comes back to you presenting a new wrinkle on your insight you hadn't ever thought of. (I love it when they're shocked by my response and say, "Wow, YOU gave me that idea??")

I'll be glad to discuss individuals with you at length, but this probably needs be done in person. Your thoughts about Luke and Ron are interesting and important, but one problem here is that soft sciences (like astrology, Ennegrams and psychoanalysis) allow people to be categorized, but these categories don't mesh with anything in the real world. They're only categories in our private or socially shared belief systems. You and I are both "nice people", for example, but this observation doesn't lead to interesting questions or significant insight. I responded more enthusiastically to your observation that Fred & Ron shared a celebrative moment with ease, making me agree that they're (mostly likely) both masculine.

You may have gotten the wrong idea about Paul from the interviews I did with his students. He was not promiscuous. He did not try to divorce his students from their parents. He didn't even try to get beautiful young men to dump their girlfriends. He wasn't perfect, but I don't recognize any of his true imperfections from what you say.

Do I want to change you? What a question! You know I don't change anyone. I'm capable of very little, actually, in the 21st century anyway. I'm typing at a computer, writing to an old friend I'm terribly fond of. I worship you, silly girl.

You already know about Sophie's "fleas on a rabbit" — fleas who, having never had the courage to climb out along the hairs of the rabbit's fur, have never become aware of the heavens. Sometimes even apparently satisfied people look back on their lives and wonder if they couldn't have done more.

But, in a way, all of us should habitually consider whether we whether we couldn't have done more. People who don't like to think about this have sometimes been discouraged from seeing themselves in the light they truly deserve, so they didn't seek what they truly wanted. They settled for what their time and place could easily offer them. Paul thought such lives were spent in an unrecognized "lifestyle depression". (See .)

When a child comes and asks what will happen when she dies, I tell her it's more important to think about what will happen if she lives. Here's how Marianne Williamson put this: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone! And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

The day Paul died his brother, after I telephoned him, sent me this letter:


August 12, 1985
Dear Dean,

Just a thought.
On the tombstone of Horace Mann
these words appear —
"It would be a shame to die
before you have won a
victory for humanity".

He might have added "and if
the victory is great enough,
you do not die at all."

A thought for Paul.

Love,

Walter

Have you and I won victories for humanity, Ann? I'd like to think this possibly is at least worth thinking about. If we don't, future generations will have the right to ask "Why?"

My next letter will be about Rachel. You might enjoy the attached snapshot.


You're right, I'm not that weird. But don't tell anybody!

And I don't believe in incessant, burdensome growth any more than I believe in incessant, burdensome shrinkage. I do believe, however, in seeing who you really are, in always leaving room for a greater sense of self, and in striving when you can for greater interpersonal accomplishments. Hindus say that we are extrusions into the temporal realm of the Godhead. That's a good enough metaphor for me. Living creatures are here to do "God's Work", not to die and be forgotten.

According to Alan Watts, one day God got bored of being the all-knowing, supremely-powerful center-of-everydamnthing, gave Himself total amnesia, and injected Himself into what He called "living creatures", one lifespan at a time. It was just a more interesting life for Him to lead. (See ) That's why we find ourselves embedded in history, trapped in the spacio-temporal bubbles that Leibniz called "monads". We have forgotten that we are God after all.

And, like it or not, we are all of us being transformed every day by personal experiences and the experiences of those around us. The good news is that our contributions can sometimes spill over far into the future. Should we care at all about future folks we'll never meet? Bertrand Russell thought so. His portrait hangs in Noam Chomsky's office with the caption "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."

In 1977, Paul inscribed one of his monographs, "To Dean, who also cares what happens to civilization." Paul, too, thought we should care.

I'm beginning to think that one of your ongoing problems is intimidation. You seem to worry an awful lot about what I think you should believe and what I think you should do. Like a habitually harangued child, you have an arsenal of well-rehearsed defenses that you brandish with regularity. You haven't yet learned that I want you to believe only what you think is true, and to do only what you think is right. We're not going to squabble about the silly things that parents and children waste their energies on. That's not God's Work, Ann. Asking new questions and finding new answers is.

Yes, Rachel is taking good care of me. Without her I doubt I'd be alive today. Nor would I have wanted to, since I felt that my life's work was over. So you can thank her for making it possible for Ann and Dean to reunite after half a century. That in itself is a pretty remarkable accomplishment, no?

My attitude about climate change is simpler than those which either of you entertain.

  1. I don't know if climate change is threatening the future of humanity. I don't know if it's too late for us to do anything.
  2. When a majority of climate scientists say it is a threat and it's not too late, I tend to believe they're on to something.
  3. I don't consider imperfect sciences, imperfect scientists or imperfect politics sufficient refutations of such claims.
  4. I have faith in the good people who are interested in this political struggle — people like you and Rachel — to figure it out sooner or later and eventually link arms.

I'm willing to sacrifice the fun I know I'd have poking atavistic politicians in the eye, in favor of working in my own unique way on my own creative projects. If I don't advocate for a better understanding of human nature, do you think we could leave this great project to climate scientists? To atavistic politicians??

I prefer to delegate the issue of global warming, as I have so many others, to those better suited to focusing on it and giving it their full attention. It took me a long time to decide that my place in this world was running discussion groups, advocating for higher awareness of our "better angels", and promoting the work of the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Now that I have found my moral center, I see no real need to "move on" to anything else. Not global warming, not reckless genetic experiments driven by corporate greed, not the gigantic asteroid that's coming straight for you at 25,000 miles per hour, not the long-term effects of the radiation we only began bombarding ourselves with a mere century ago, not the hazards of standing by and watching computers become conscious only to decide that our kind is not necessary for their future happiness, and certainly not the myriad threats our species can't even imagine yet because our brain is so tiny.

Nevertheless, we are a species with, for such a paltry planet, a uniquely advanced brain that makes us insatiably curious about the limits of our world. We will always go past those limits, and many of our bravest explorers will die trying to bring us new knowledge of the universe. One day a space station will explode, sending scores of brave men, women and children hurtling "straight out into the empty blackness of space to die horribly and slowly" (as Captain Vogon Jeltz delicately puts it in .) You can fight City Hall, it seems, but you can't fight statistics. (See )

When I first met Paul I told him I wanted to be either a politician or a rock star. "Thank goodness," he said, "that I can save you from such disasters." When I asked him why politics is a bad career choice, he said, "It'll corrupt you. You have to hurt too many people." It's taken me four decades to realize he was right.

And I stay away from animal rights for the same reason that I didn't go into law enforcement. I'd have been a "bad cop", someone who beats up lots of wannabe felons but who doesn't actually make the world any safer. As an animal rights advocate, I'd be totally radical, invading cosmetic labs, rescuing the rabbits, setting fire to the building — and hopefully injuring a few evil doers "accidentally" in the process. In other words, I'd be in jail.

"Find your bliss," said . Right now my bliss is in sitting at my computer, sipping coffee, and fire-hosing a jumble of words onto a vast salad plate called the internet, and in which a dear old friend might someday find intellectual nourishment. But please don't think there aren't sacrifices as well in the lifestyle I've chosen. Like , I've had to work alone and be ostracized by my colleagues. But, like Freddy, I've found happiness giving from the best in me to even the worst of them.

The "conflicting obsessions" you complain about are only a problem if you want them to be. I deal with scores of people every week who may be ignorant about or even totally opposed to things I consider essential to my life. So what? I admit that it's comforting to surround yourself with those who agree with you about everything, but Paul used to call that "nest feathering" and he and I never had much use for it. Marcus Aurelius said, "Nothing human is alien to me." I say, "Bring it on, weirdos. We have a lot to learn from one another!"

Of course there are limits to this rather liberal policy. It took me awhile to recognize and defend myself against the truly seductive weirdos. In my twenties, and with Paul's encouragement, I invented what I later called "psychocalisthenics" — habitually exercising one's social skills to the fullest, in order to strength them and slowly achieve more and better interpersonal capabilities. At first I used to take long walks in Central Park, asking everyone I encountered what time it was, just to build up my self-confidence. Then I became one of a handful of leaders conducting talk groups at the Gay Activist Alliance, not because their ideas interested me much, but because I wanted to learn how to interest them in my ideas. And, of course, I continued this skill-building at a much higher level during the two decades in which the Ninth Street Center thrived. Becoming experienced in this way gives you a sense of smell about who's to be trusted and who isn't. (See )

No, I wouldn't want to explore friendships with serial killers, people who torture animals or make snuff films — or anyone who doesn't listen at least twice a day to the three-part inventions of Johann Sebastian Bach. But how many of these types do we tend to run into nowadays? And Rachel is none of these. If she is rude it's because the experience of having anybody actually listen to her is still a great novelty. All you have to do is call her attention to her tone of voice by saying in a friendly way, "Please treat me a little better, Rachel?" She'll stop. Can you learn to stand up to her? Yes, you can. And she'll offer you the same service in return.

The real problem here is that both of you are obsessing (though I prefer the term "compulsing") about an issue that we've allowed dishonest politicians to frame and distort. There's no way for honest, responable people to find harmony in such a hailstorm of psychic dissonance. Yes, they're trying to confuse us to death.

Ann, I think the world of you and Rachel. You both have the intellectual resources to be interested in one another, and to help one another. But I don't really want to interfere here. There should be two cooks brewing any friendship, not three. And if it doesn't happen, I'm not worried. You both will find other opportunities for social exploration when and if you're ready to welcome them.

By the way, Paul wasn't that weird either. I'll leave you with an excerpt from a 1968 conversation he had with Seymour Shubin of the SK&F Psychiatric Reporter. (See )

"You know," said Paul, "the word psychedelic, unfortunately, has become attached to the drug scene. Actually, its a very good word and means such things as a state of great mental calm and intense perception of the senses. All of this, however, can be acquired in a much more powerful way psychologically than through drugs. I mean by going 'flexible' inside, by being willing to receive new 'information' so that you can just taste, smell or feel something in a new way. However, to be able to do this often requires you to make great changes in your life."

"Coming from an 'unconventional' person,", I said, "that doesn't sound very unconventional to me."

Paul smiled, "I often have to laugh at myself because I am like radical and flexible, and yet my patients always go toward the abiding values of life. They tend to give up drugs, they tend to give up promiscuity, they tend to get an image of a 'true, mated union' between partners. I try to demonstrate to them that man is essentially a mated animal.

"You know, it's not that hard to get people to be moral if they have a motivation for it. And though this may sound the most conventional of all, a good motivation is to care about the welfare of other people, and to really want to be loved."

I really love the photo! Thank you so much! How cute we were!

I enjoy writing letters and having time to think, too. I spend time on Facebook, and I enjoy things about that, too, but it lends itself to short posts, never more than a paragraph, and I am more of a long-form person, who enjoys reading whole books, whereas the people on Facebook rarely reference anything longer than a short article. But I wanted to master the form, and I did, and it gives me a chance to talk to people all over the country and even in other countries. I don't want to try Twitter, which is so absurdly short and fast that people get into huge controversies about nothing much. Actually I think Facebook is my fun activity; my spiritual/mystical activities are a bit more serious, since I see them as an alternate way of getting information. I also have used Facebook to practice arguments. I debated deniers online for a while when I was getting ready to teach climate change. I wanted to prepare for things that students might throw at me, and I wanted to make sure I could explain important facts coherently.

Actually arguing is also a fun activity for me. I grew up in a home where lively discussions were considered good sport. Fred grew up in a home where disagreement was a prelude to violence, so it took me a while to convince him that it was OK to disagree and that I wanted to help him develop his own ideas. When I described to my daughter, who was a teenager, that her dad used to be much more quiet and less forceful, she said that I should have left him like that!

But I'm trying to move in a different direction now, as I work with CCL. All the recent research indicates that you get nowhere on climate change by arguing or stating facts, that you have to form sincere common bonds and suggest ways to protect those. It still won't work with everyone, but it will work with some people, and if those people include members of Congress, we may have a chance to move forward. The other factor is that I loved working like that, with other sincere people from CCL. It felt so good! There are so many different ways to work on slowing down climate change, I am determined to pick one that is also pleasurable. Lots of people approach this by preaching or moralizing, insisting that everyone should become a vegan, or everyone should move to the country and go off the grid, or that we need a revolution. None of that works for me. There needs to be room for individuals to work creatively in their own ways, or else it's not my movement.

So Paul used to say that "creativity is as common as pig tracks." That certainly reminds me of what the Libertarian says in his essay , which I have taught many times: "genius is as common as dirt." So, sure, you and I are both trying to empower people, each in our own way and with our own vocabulary or vocabularies.

I think you were a little tough on the man-baby. Don't people usually reveal sexual fantasies because they want you to help enact them? He wanted you to bring him a warm bottle!

I once shared a train ride with a man who I knew was having affairs with 3 women. I was curious about what they all saw in him. At first he seemed charming, but then he began pressing me to tell him my sexual fantasies. I guess he tried to seduce everyone, so occasionally he got lucky.

Yes, vocabulary can be a big problem. I think it is especially a problem when we try to talk about spiritual or metaphysical issues. Our society is so heavily rational and materialistic that it denigrates these issues and doesn't try to develop precise vocabulary. I think that you keep misunderstanding me about this, so I'll try to be clearer. I am not pursuing this because I am afraid of your disapproval or longing for your approval, but rather because I would like to be understood as I am, if possible. It's a charming fantasy, that I dance naked in the moonlight with my coven, but it's not what's going on.

I find that most people belong to a clearly defined camp, if they care about this issue. (And many just care about comfort or money.) But if they care about science versus spirit, they have a clear preference. You seem to prefer science, which is fine. My husband strongly prefers science. I find myself in both camps, however, which is sometimes a difficult balancing act. I can talk to intelligent people in either camp, but I actually live in both. I believe in both physics and metaphysics.

Like most people in this society, I was brought up to ignore my intuition. When I was 20, I felt a flash of fear when I was talking to a man. I ignored it, and later he raped me. Another time, I had a premonition that our apartment would be burglarized. This time I knew better than to ignore it, so I put on all my favorite jewelry, went to work wearing 3 necklaces, and yes, a burglar stole our television set while I was at work. Could this just be my unconsciousness processing some sort of information my consciousness is unaware of? Possibly, but I've also had a couple of specific precognitive dreams, and some interesting visions, and I've spoken to other people who also get this kind of information. When I was working as a proofreader for J Walter Thompson, I used to do Tarot readings on slow days, and three of the women told me similar stories. One of them had a dream, as a teenager, that her mother found an incriminating letter she had written, about certain misbehavior, and had not only grounded her, but called the parents of every other person mentioned in the letter and destroyed her social life. She woke up, found the letter, was relieved and left it where it was. Later in the day, her mother found the letter and everything came true as she had dreamed it. In a culture in which people respect dreams, it would have been a warning dream and she would have destroyed or mailed the letter. In the US, it became a precognitive dream! For me, I respect the fact that a lot of information comes to me in dreams, visions, and feelings, and I participate in various spiritual activities in order to keep the channels open and keep getting that information. When I stop doing these things, I really miss them and I get frazzled. So if I say that I believe in powers, like telepathy, precognition, and telekinesis, I am basing it on evidence of this sort. Yes, just anecdotes, but each of them is very special and powerful to me.

I went through a period when I wanted to know what really happened in my drumming group. Were we talking to spirits and traveling to other dimensions, or were we just unlocking other aspects of our own minds? I finally decided that it didn't matter, that the important thing was that I felt renewed and refreshed after a session.

Do I believe in God? I don't believe in a separate Creator, but I do think there's some kind of energy that runs through the universe and connects everything. I believe that this energy influences evolution, which is a process in which the universe is trying to create forms that will understand and appreciate it. That's not my original idea. It comes from The Future of the Body, by Michael Murphy of Esalen, but it's the best idea I've found so far. The question is whether humans will be a successful or an unsuccessful experiment, on the part of the universe.

I haven't looked at the links, but I have a lot to say without reading anything, so I'll send this out.

A little more about the topics raised here:

Yes, I remember now that Paul was more interested in mated relationships than in promiscuous ones, and actually I don't really care how anyone manages his/her relationships. What I was trying to express was that I read more than half of your book happily, feeling as if I too were a young, creative person in your circle. Then reading the interview with Kim M., I did a flip and felt like I identified more with the parents than the young people. The passage that disturbed me is on page 142. Kim obviously feels bad about the young man he was counseling who committed suicide, but his assurance that he did everything right starts to break down as he talks: "I did a good job and an appropriate job of trying to calm him down and ease some of his exhaustion — which was fine. But we always assume that we have to support everybody who comes to the Center by helping them cut off their conventional ties or their ties with their parents and take on more independence. And this really showed me there was just a whole level of things I wasn't looking at — and wanted to look at. So I felt exhausted at that point and stopped counseling right then for that reason." So combining that passage with Laurie's description of how Paul urged her to drop out of college, I realized that I play for the opposite team. I am usually the one urging young people to stay in school or to talk to their parents. And although I don't know the details, I started to think that peer counseling should be supervised, and for various reasons I think that with difficult problems, family counseling is the best way to go. Modern parents, like me, take safety very seriously. For example, one of April's friends told a counselor at his college that he was hearing voices, and the counselor immediately had him hospitalized until someone could evaluate him. The young man was quite indignant, but I thought the counselor was correct. I don't think I am overprotective. I've never told my daughter not to go rafting or kayaking, although death on the river is always a possibility, and one of her friends drowned in the spring. I believe you have to express what you love, so I have never tried to stop Fred or April from racing downhill on skis or going over waterfalls in tubes or kayaks. But dying young from mental illness seems like an awful waste to me.

I like the Marianne Williamson quote. I do feel powerful, brilliant, gorgeous, etc., but we women have to hide that. Girl culture, which you may not have experienced, is all about putting down anyone who lets on that she has self-esteem. "Don't be stuck up," that's what girls tell each other. I have endured so many instances of people whom I thought were friends turning angry jealous on me that I have become pretty careful to only choose friends who are about as lucky as I am. That's not how I wanted to conduct my life, but it's how it turned out. My favorite joy, which I hardly ever share, is how close I was to April. For the first ten years, we had a continual love fest. She was so creative, so kind, so loving, so artistic. Meanwhile, my friends had all kinds of problems and dissatisfactions with their children, so I never told them exactly what I was feeling. Then, of course, April had to turn her attention more to getting along with her peers and toughening up, and also she began to focus more on her father and less on me, but wow, I had 10 years of euphoria with this beautiful, sparkling being. She's a funny, creative, sensitive, adventurous 25-year-old now, but she lives out west, and I miss her.

I have company coming, but let's see if I have time for one more paragraph. I see my own life as falling into chapters, mostly 20-year chapters. The first 20 years were devoted to growing and learning, with my family and at schools. Sometimes it felt like prison, sure, but I got my BA from Cornell when I was 20, and after that I had plenty of choices. Then there were 20 years of searching, looking for a mate, exploring my creativity, and trying out different jobs. Lots of ups and downs, lots of confusion, I got a master's in Architecture and hated working in the field, for example. But by the time I was 40, I felt a clear calling to devote myself to service, and after that everything fell into place. I got pregnant, so I had a new being to take care of, and I started teaching, which I loved from the beginning, and of course Fred & I take care of each other, so I had a balanced group of responsibilities. At that time, I did have a fun drumming group. Sometimes our leader would take us all out to his lavish house in Pennsylvania, where we would dance and play on his collection of sacred instruments until we were exhausted. (Meanwhile, Fred took care of April back in Queens.) It was a very good life, even though my parents and my aunts and even some of my friends died during this time, but then in 2005 I discovered global warming. I read an article in the New Yorker, which scared me to death for April, and then I did a workshop with an Eskimo shaman from Greenland who really wanted to beg the industrial countries to pay attention to what was already happening to his home and his people. So I saw that I hadn't been so unselfish after all. I had put out of my mind what I should have noticed, that modern civilization was destroying the natural world, because I wanted to have a child, and now that child is condemned to grow old, if she does grow old, in a world of ever increasing droughts, storms, floods, and wildfires!

Well, my friends are here, so bye for now!

You and I are not far apart in any significant way except one. You specialize in understanding the world around you and expanding your insights in increasingly deeper ways. I specialize in taking responsibility for the world around me and applying my methods to broadening areas of social reality. What has drawn us to one another in this correspondence is that we are both "open". We are "works in progress", unafraid to admit our imperfections but militant in defending our right to be who we are here and now, who we were a long time ago and far, far away — and even who we hope to be. Yes, we are geniuses — but in deceptively different ways that tend to make people in such such situations insanely curious about what makes the other "tick".

But this difference, at least the way I'm trying to convey it, is complementary and not contradictory. Your personality is designed to "seek the truth" (in Paul's vocabulary). My personality is designed to "reach for the right". People like you collaborating with people like me have built this damn civilization. We fully deserve to be rewarded by the warmth and pride that flood our consciousness when we realize what we and the giants whose shoulders we stand on have done.

You've heard about the so-called war between men and women. Civilized people don't indulge in such nonsense any more than they indulge in bar fights. Paul used to talk about the war between masculines and feminines — a more subtle form of barbarism, perhaps, but equally pointless. It's important that you and I never find ourselves defending our character type when we should be using these unique resources to help one another in the manner described by Plato in the Symposium.

Just because we address many contemporary issues quite differently, this doesn't mean we need to draw the other into our own particular mode of adaptation to life or to denigrate the other's character specialization. That would be as fruitless as denying vestigial gender differences, or accepting the recommendation I used to hear in our youth that all of us should have "well-rounded" personalities. I don't need no stinkin' well-rounded, polished, or even "mature" personality — brands marketed by the evil "finishing schools" of the early 20th century. After I became disgusted by industrial science as taught in high school, I decided I would have to pull back and review the history of human thought itself. St. John's wasn't horrible, but one of their great conceits was that we were studying "The Great Books". Actually they had not in fact bothered to shift through the hundreds of thousands of books that had been published since Gutenberg. We studied books they happened to find on "great books" lists, the compiling of which had become a fad among scholars only a century before. (See )

Another conceit was pretending that we couldn't really understand any book until we had read it in its author's language. And while reading Plato in the Greek has its charms, this is only sesselfurzer-style pretend scholarship. Young people don't have time for any of this if they really need some truth now. I in particular was too desperate to wait four years for wisdom. (See .)

For the three years I stayed at St. John's I became increasingly bored with the technical philosophers and conducted my own survey of thinkers (the imaginative ones, not the fundamentalists). So I dipped my twinkle toes into lots of ancient belief systems — Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and (not to leave out the civil servants) Confucianism. I also investigated recent humanistic post-theologians like Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Krishnamurti.

From these extracurricular studies I learned that ethics had gone through important changes over the centuries. Old-testament justice idealized an angry God driven to revenge — inspired probably by tribal mafia-style justice. Their paltry Ten Commandments merely told you what not to do. Some of them sound quite silly today.

New-testament justice idealized a merciful God bent on salvation, but seemed more difficult to obey. I mean it's a lot easier to not covet your neighbor's wife than it is to love they neighbor as thyself, right? And it was pretty spongy about retribution. I mean, can I really get away with just about ANYTHING and still be forgiven if I can find a confessional??

20th-centuary situational ethics seemed the most humane while at the same time making it harder than ever to know what's right and what's wrong with the behavior of those around you. We always knew that different nations (including Louisiana) had the right to develop quite different legal systems, but does your neighbor next door have that right as well?

So no, I am not a "materialist". Richard Fallin is, if you're curious about that viewpoint. In fact I eschew all reductionisms. I've learned a lot from phenomenologists like Anton Hardy, but I'm as confused as anybody about how we're eventually going to understand how and why mind and body relate. Even in the 21st century we seem to still be going through a flurry of false solutions to oversimplified questions. (See ) I believe that the only thing that can help us from growing rigid as we age, and yet stay "open" to the as yet unanswered questions, is repeatedly renewing what Paul called "the adolescent spirit". To me this is the most important psychological exercise there can be, whether it is effected by fantasy, play, drumming or dreaming. (See .)

too talked about the adolescent spirit. He was the only zoologist Paul ever expressed admiration for. "He seems to be on to something," Paul said after I showed him . Desmond taught that parents who criticize their children for "acting like wild animals" had it backwards. Human children retain their curiosity and ambition, not to mention their abilities to play and fantasize, much longer than those of any other species. It is in fact their carping parents who are "acting like wild animals" since most mammals rigidify much earlier than any of the primates. It sounds like Facebook is a useful playground for you — for now. I stay away from it simply because I've been lucky enough in my lifetime to enjoy a real playground here on Ninth Street where I learned all the practical hob-nobbing skills I need for the moment. You're right to think that 99% of those you'll meet on Facebook (and all the other digital watering holes too) won't have anything of genuine interest to say to you. They might say, "Oh, I liked what you just said." Or "You should watch that blah-blah movie because it mentions animal rights." There's a place for that level of chit-chat of course, but unless you cultivate fans who really want to learn some important shit from you, the rewards of rubbing shoulders with humans who expect little of themselves will inevitably taper off like the last grains of sand from an hourglass.

I tend to use an array of "filters" to help me find the companions I want. The Ninth Street Center filtered out homophobics, both straight and gay. And even there I didn't approach new people until they had spent two years working with Paul's ideas. The Enlightenment Book Club filters out those who think we can know where we're going without knowing where we've come from. Small social networks like CHESS.COM let me chat with young people who can think and, quite often, speak. (I wish I could do something about the language barriers, though.)

Did the liddle man-baby want me to bring him a warm fuzzy boddle? I was trying to teach him the great lessons I had learned from decades of fighting on the forefront of gay liberation. If anything, his whimper showed me that I was barking up the wrong tree. After spending two years professing devotion to the greater truths I was offering — and after just one challenging moment — he disappeared from sight. People this foolish and weak have no use for truth or right. They just seek approval. Their mantra is that old refrain, "I'm good enough. And people like me" — a line that Al Franken penned to poke fun at such idiots. I can't stand up for them if they won't stand up for themselves.

And you're so right about Twitter. "People get into huge controversies about nothing much." Will Durant said that 20th-century academics know "more and more about less and less". No politics is more bitter than the infighting of academics clawing their way to the corner office. How can some people get wrapped up in such twaddle when people like us feel only repulsion? "Arguing is a fun activity for me." I'll have to take your word for that. To me it's a waste of time. Anybody, anywhere, anytime has the power to say, "I disagree" or "How do you know?" or "Can you prove that?" and get away with it. Such quibbling has nothing to do with the sort of mutual teaching and leading I advocate in my social contract. But as long as it's merely fun, it might not be as toxic for you as it would be for me. I relish verbal jousting only when it's understood that truth has no business mucking up our game. For me, jousting is merely the human equivalent of cats playing patticake.

I have used discussion groups to great effect and have attended and hosted hundreds of them. We used to call them "talk groups" at the Center to sound less academic. But I never allow attendees to just "sound off" or listen to themselves talk. At the end of the evening we need to have arrived at a greater understand of ourselves and our problems or I'll know that something went very wrong.

You yourself say, "You get nowhere on climate change by arguing." I would say that you get nowhere arguing about anything your friend has already made up his mind about. As you've said, if you care about him you need to learn how not to be provoked by his arrogance, how to be wise enough to wait until his mind is ready to entertain new ideas. In his first book, Paul called this the "Scylla and Charybdis" principle. I call it wisdom and strength. "Only universal love gives men a view of life of sufficient scope to put aggression in its place; only objective power gives men a way of life of sufficient grasp to undo the influence of passivity. Odysseus survived his passage past the home of the monster, Scylla, only through insight given by the gods; modern man dares to expect of himself insights great enough for the task. Odysseus did not yield to the temptation to fight Scylla; he withdrew, allowing Scylla those inroads which he could not prevent. He survived the passage of Charybdis by ignoring her, giving him mastery over this danger. In so doing, he surrendered all claim on feeling in the situation, putting his curiosity aside. In the myth of Scylla and Charybdis the ancient Greeks laid down the fundamental rules of creative dealing with aggression and passivity. Aggression is not to be fought on its own grounds; passivity is not to be permitted to entangle its victim in its own premises of thought."

You add, "There needs to be room for individuals to work creatively in their own ways, or else it's not my movement." Amen, brother! Ann, please be careful how you use words. The spongy word "spiritual" has nothing to do with the word "metaphysics", which is well-defined at least among philosophers. Let's agree that people in supposedly advanced Western societies have little or no taste for introspection, as witness the snail's pace of the dissemination of phenomenology's discoveries or our utter inability to resolve Cartesian dualism. We don't know how to discuss numerous many forbidden issues that lie hidden in the open. I don't prefer science over spirit, and not merely because I don't yet really understand how you're using such terms. But I do believe that you and I can get somewhere by struggling up Sisyphus' hill. I'm not a cynic.

Always try to see the big picture. We live in an era of rapid technological change, but culture too is progressing. Involvements we considered critical to our identity only decades ago have already been displaced by better ones. This is why I don't write about mankind's short-term leaps and bounds: it won't take many generations until nobody knows, or cares, what the hell I was babbling about. I focus instead on the "big issues", questions that aren't about to go away any time soon. We all love to believe and proclaim our loyalty to justice, yet there's lots of reasons to think we haven't figured out what justice can or should mean. Just this morning, Rachel and I learned what a dream the struggle for justice can be. She woke up to find Scratchie playing with a baby mouse. "No!" she yelled, chasing him away with a spank. But the baby had died, still warm and bleeding from his wounds. Both of us were close to tears. I chased the cat and spanked him harder than she did, after which he hid in a crawl space I always leave for my cats when they need to hide from humans. Neither Rachel or I responded to his pleas for treats or cuddling this afternoon. "You're a bad cat," we both thought. "You're going to have to learn the rules."

But a little reflection told us that, although humans and cats can act like one happy family, this is also a kind of social contract — an agreement to ignore the truth and play a game called parasitism. His illusion was wrought by thousands of years of genetic evolution, ours by thousands of years of cultural elaboration. Forgetting and forgiving the differences in species inevitably comes with hidden costs.

Here's what Scratchie is thinking as I type: "Those giants are so stupid. I try to rid our home of vermin and I get punished for my good deeds? There's no justice here!" And he's right. What we did wasn't about justice. It was based on our failure

  1. to recognize and accept his nature,
  2. to realize that at the end of the day there's a vast gulf between his nature and our's, and
  3. to understand that there are many things that he will never understand, and that it will always be our responsibility to protect anything in our home, alive or not, from him.

Rachel and I are not the only humans to misconstrue the nature of animals. Richard Milner, a friend of mine who writes well-respected books about the history of evolutionary theory, agree that one of my albeit trivial scholarly achievements was in having discovered the worst children's book about dinosaurs ever written. Parade of Ancient Animals was penned in 1936 by a moron named Harold O. Whitnall, head of the department of geology at Colgate University. Some random quotes: "The lazy stupid dinosaurs never had any children and when they died their race died with them and they became extinct."

"Brontosaurus was dull and stupid. It knew just about enough to know when it was dinner time. From its size it would seem that all times were meal times."

"Since the animals on which he fed were just as stupid as he was, he didn't have to chase them far. Tyrannosaurus was the cruelest beast of his time."

Even geologists are supposed to have at least heard of natural selection!

Let's pull back the camera a bit and look at an example of conflicting concepts of justice among humans. I was a juror on a murder trial several decades ago. Six black teenage gunmen had surrounded a boy in Harlem who had insulted one of their sisters and riddled him with bullets. Gang executions like this have the advantage that you can never prove who fired the fatal shot. Utah used this technique when executing Gary Gilmore. But what surprised me was that

  1. None of the witnesses, all of whom were local residents, thought this deed was anything more than justified retribution.
  2. Few of them had much familiarity with trial procedures. One asked the prosecutor, "Why are we going over this again? I explained everything in your office last week."

Despite the fact that the blacks on the jury were the most insistent that the murderers be sentenced to long jail terms, I took away the eery feeling that downtown justice bore little or no relation to uptown justice. It occurred to me to wonder, since nations don't dictate their standards of justice to foreign nations, why we are dictating our standard of justice to a tiny encircled nation called Harlem which has it own thank you?

This is why I'm not in favor of powerful groups telling weaker groups how to live. Fool "W" decided to "liberate" Afghans by forcing "democracy" down their throats — without asking them what they thought of the idea. But tribes who live in a vast underpopulated desert can barely deal with 15th-century warlord-style rulers. Any imposition by foreigners of more "advanced" forms of governance only invites chaos. "Nation building" is a dream shared only by those who have been reciting the "Pledge of Allegiance" far too long. Afghans have to build their own nation in their own way.

And what's so great about democracies who elect dictators, terrorists and just plain crazy people anyway? Before peoples can have meaningful and valuable democratic institutions they first have to develop a need for them. This is why, hundreds of years after its founding, the U.S. hasn't yet really aspired to anything more than a representative democracy.

When smug bullies lord it over noble savages what you get is British soldiers hanging New Zealand boys for adhering to their ancient devotional ritual of eating dead parents to keep their souls alive. It is the worst conceit for advanced Westerners to assume that everybody instantly recognizes that their policies are superior. When Spike Lee directed "Malcolm X" lots of black kids started wearing baseball caps with X's on them. Robin Quivers quipped, "All they know about Malcolm is what's on their hat." Today, undereducated blacks think that all they need to know about justice is that "Black lives matter". Why indeed should they trouble themselves with understanding the purpose of grand juries when they can simply pour into the streets and condemn "The Man"? Many blacks still believe that the cops who shot Amadou Diallo should have fried, despite the fact that the foreman of the jury that acquitted them was a black woman with enough integrity to avoid giving in to their prejudices. (See )

Ignorance of our legal system is actually exploited by demagogues like Al Sharpton. As Mort Sahl used to say, "Martin Luther King had a dream. Jesse Jackson has a scheme." We need to stop thinking in slogans and bumper stickers.

Most of the "justice" that naive people seek through protest and litigation is illusory. What they really seek is revenge, and they even may even talk themselves into believing that revenge can rehabilitate their oppressors. Sometimes it does, but more often it makes the oppressor more vicious than ever. Jails often torture felons until they are supremely equipped psychologically to commit even more merciless crimes once they get out. The wronged always seek revenge, it turns out. Wronged peoples can wait centuries. I was shocked to learn that you had been raped. But I'm proud that you seem to have put it behind you, and for that reason will not ask you to go into detail. You understand well what reliving the horror of such an incident would do to you. I've never been abused much, but many more conventional people in my circumstances would have sued Paul for talking his patient into an inappropriate sexual relationship. I saw clearly what such a wild goose chase for a justice that only exists in dreams would have done to me so I simply walked away from his mistake.

I will only say that your intuition is NOT magical. To me it is simply the residue of a lifetime of thinking carefully about yourself and your world. When we've learned a lesson, we tend to forget the dots we had to connect to learn it. Words like "telepathy, precognition, and telekinesis" mean very different things than what can more simply be identified as insight. So yes, always use your intuition. It's the most important tool you have. It would be a big mistake to presume that Kim M. or any of the other kids I interviewed really represented Paul's ideas. All of these people who are still alive have drifted away from our movement. Kim especially has led a meaningless "lost soul" kind of life. He ended up a minor bureaucrat in a dead-end social service job. What you saw in that interview was the foreshadowing of his failure to comprehend and retain any real loyalty to new ideas. As I've said, most of them were simply looking for approval from an official psychiatric professional. That we tried to teach them any more than this was our fault, and a labor that I sometimes regret. We tried to turn sows' ears into silk purses.

Neither Paul nor I ever told anybody that they had to cut off ties with their parents. We simply made it clear that we wouldn't abandon them if they did. Laurie was becoming very sick because she was the daughter of one of the founding fathers of the American Communist Party and "higher education" wasn't teaching her anything she needed to know. Dropping out saved her sanity. And dropping out saved mine too, even though Paul was willing to wait until I graduated. But instead of making assumptions about Laurie, why not ask her if Paul helped her? Her website is http://gentleriver.com.

For most of us, the assumption that we can resolve all the issues that separate us from our parents, or from our colleges and universities, is a sad delusion. Have you ever worked with a "family therapist", Ann? You do not "play for the opposite team" here. You were raised by parents who were vastly more developed intellectually than mine were, and your identity wasn't continually undermined by any perversely "other-directed" conformity being imposed on you. And, since you weren't gay, you never had parents who told you, like many of the Center boys' had, "You're embarrassment. We wish you had never been born." If I had stayed in contact with my parents for much longer than I did my life would have ended in tragedy. As happens with most of us, at a certain point we become the parents and they the children. I supported Frank and Vickie as best I could when this happened, but they made it abundantly clear to the very end that they didn't need advice from someone who should have just stayed in his room.

This is not a game where you just make up a bunch of rules and then sit back and see what happens. This is life. It takes on ongoing interaction, an interdigitation, with the Other. People in different kinds of trouble need different kinds of support. But there's no reason you can't decide to roll up your sleeves and get involved in psychotherapy, co-counseling, spiritual healing — use any name you like — before your number is up. It would help you grok all the thorny issues that Paul and I had to deal with, without resorting to ad-hoc broad-brush policies.

Of course Paul supervised our counselors, and so did I. But they were volunteers, not salaried employees. They didn't always come to us, and sometimes when we heard what they were up to we were flabbergasted. There's no way to supervise behavior that is only reported to you after the fact, especially if you're working mostly from third-hand rumors. We had no way to decertify them. "I do feel powerful, brilliant, gorgeous, etc, but we women have to hide that." If I can imagine Marianne's retort to your statement it would have to be, Who are you to hide that? Don't serve your oppressors. Serve your liberators. Even better, be the liberators you yearn for.

Gandhi often said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." If you and I don't do this, Ann, who will? And it's never too late to start. I was delighted to hear about your happiness with April. You should write it up someday. In twenty years April will read it and appreciate you all the more for it. If you want I could publish your memoir on the web in anticipation of its appearance in book form. Yes, there certainly is energy that runs through the universe and connects everything, just as theologians have certainly evolved into subatomic particle physicists. But unless you're familiar with M-Theory I won't spoil the ending for you. It's spectacular! (See ) I need increasingly to delegate responsibilities to the more capable members of our book club. Would you be willing to lead a discussion of John Gatto's Against School? How about throwing in an excerpt from by as well?

I seem to have the most energy around this idea of hiding vs. shining right now. In your childhood, you were persecuted by your parents. (Are you older or younger than your sister, by the way?) In my childhood, I had to be careful to avoid persecution by my peers. I have always been articulate in an academic setting, and I was never intimidated by teachers, since both my parents were teachers, and I knew they were just human beings. But other children could be scary, and I had to try to develop a pleasant, modest personality so that they wouldn't resent my success too much. First and second grade were fun, and I managed to be both smart and popular, but then my parents and the school decided to skip the 6 smartest kids, so that we wouldn't be bored. The 6 of us worked together in a small group, covering the 3rd grade work in a couple of months. I bonded with Wendy Levins, who became my life-long friend, in those months at the end of 2nd grade, and then we started 4th grade in the fall. From then on things became complicated. There was one boy, Robert R., who had always been the smartest one in that grade before I arrived, and he hated me so much that he organized a Hate Ann Club and gradually turned all the boys who had liked me and Wendy against us. For a while, I came home and cried every day. I didn't really feel comfortable again until 7th grade, when Robert choose 2 year SP and I chose 3 year SP and we were finally in different classes. But of course that meant I had to spend 3 years in junior high while Robert got out in 2.

I am reading Andrew Solomon's excellent book, Far from the Tree (I gave you part of his transgender chapter), and he talks about "the rhetoric of anti-elitism that has fueled American politics" in his chapter on gifted children. Here is a passage that really hit home for me: Many gifted children choose between being ostracized and going underground; many disidentify, attempting to seem less accomplished for the sake of peer approval. One survey of super-high-IQ students showed that 4 out of 5 were constantly monitoring themselves in an attempt to conform to the norms of less gifted children.

I don't think I ever stopped thinking of myself as gifted, but I knew I had to be careful. There was always the threat of ostracism or even physical violence if one stood out too much. One reason why it feels so cool to be friends with Ron S today is that I remember him, with a couple of his friends, cornering me and Wendy and beating our legs with sticks. But somehow he turned into a civilized person after a while, and he has no memory of hitting us, remembering himself as a kindly child.

Junior high school and high school were mostly fine. I chose to stay in Queens and get to do lots of extracurricular activities in my local high school, instead of spending hours commuting to and from a school like the Bronx High School of Science. I was co-editor of the Flushing High School literary magazine and wrote many pieces for it (I should have been sole editor, but that's another story), my friend Tod edited the yearbook, and Wendy edited the newspaper. I was valedictorian, and I ended up going to Cornell in a special program called the 6 year Ph.D. Program. The misguided idea was that the country would need a lot more Ph.D.'s soon, and the program would turn them out fast. We would get a Bachelor's in 3 years and a Ph.D. in the following 3, and we would save time by staying at the same school and working with the same senior professors from the beginning. We were nicknamed the Phuds, and of course the other students regarded us with a mixture of envy and revulsion.

This is when things got really weird and horrible. In the spring of my first year at Cornell, someone set fire to our dormitory in the early morning, it burned down in a fierce blaze, and 9 people died. I had made one good friend, a brilliant mathematician from CA named Jeff Smith, and he was killed, as well as 2 other students in our program, our resident faculty advisor who went back into the building to try to save people, and 5 senior women who had the misfortune to be housed with us. I escaped unharmed, my parents immediately drove up and we spent a couple of nights in a motel, and then the university found me a place in an ordinary dorm, where I set about making "ordinary" friends, although one of them was also quite wonderful. Emotionally I was sorrowful rather than anxious at first, but then 2 more fires were set, both in buildings in which Phuds were living, and I became panicky and made an effort to avoid the company of other survivors.

Suspicion immediately fell on us, the Phuds. One of us brilliant misfits must have set the fire and killed the others, right? The police interviewed everybody, and they said that they knew who did it and had the person under surveillance but didn't have enough evidence for a court case, and in the fall they said that the person had left the school. Of course, several people had left the school after all that, so I never knew who it was until last summer, when the Phuds of my class had our first-ever reunion, which was great. We had all been traumatized, back in 1967, but we finally got to talk about it in 2014, in an inn near Ithaca, and visit our former dorm, now beautifully renovated and finally equipped with sprinklers, and have a fun cookout near a lake. (I even discovered who set the fire. He was a Phud, his name was Kaufman, and the college will tell you that he's dead, but he actually took another name and is living in NJ, and yes, I am sure of all this, and we are trying to have the case reopened, but we probably won't succeed.)

More important, I learned that our particular class of Phuds were individualistic and talented, as well as brilliant, and that the administrators picked much straighter smart people for the next batch, because they had concluded that we individualists were not really suited for an accelerated program. But we had our one beautiful weekend together last summer, and we got a chance to love each other, mostly, and hear about the interesting, unpredictable paths we had taken. A couple of people were heavily involved in dance, one fellow makes wine, several of us became college professors, other people started businesses, a couple never got their lives together.

For me, after the fire, I wanted to be just an ordinary person and not stand out. I stayed at Cornell and rushed through my degree, and then I devoted myself to hobbies and my social life, and it was a long time before any kind of ambition resurfaced, and then it was modest ambition, to get a master's degree and some kind of profession. But my early idea, that I would someday be an important person, was pretty much gone after the fires and the way Cornell seemed to lose interest in us afterwards and never provided any closure or justice. I talked a lot after the reunion to my friend Bob S., who was promised and betrayed in an even more extreme way but is still trying to save the world by developing very cheap solar energy. (He's obviously a masculine personality.) Bob's ideas about when and how the U.S. government went wrong are pretty interesting, but perhaps off the main topic here.

So I am wondering if, at some level, shining just seems excessively dangerous to me. I wandered around Europe for a while after college, and when I came back I worked for the phone company and for an insurance company, very ordinary jobs for someone of my talents. When I actually decide to do something, I want to do it as well as possible, but I also hate to work full time, guard my schedule jealously, and manage to work things out so that I always have some free and independent time.

Despite my being self-protective and preferring small groups to large institutions (as you do yourself), I haven't heard anyone but you call me "intimidated." Does it have a different meaning in your theory than the usual one? I get a reasonable amount of feedback on my behavior in groups, and people usually tell me I am forceful. My students often call me the best English teacher they ever had. I did have one friend break up with me last summer, who said that I had become mentally ill and boring and that I talked too much about the end of the world. (She seemed much more upset about my becoming boring than about my becoming mentally ill.)

On a more positive note, I am a bit of a heroine in my English department because I challenged the president of the college at a public meeting. We were all engaged in a complicated political crisis, and she (the president) had decided to invalidate our recent election for chair. Everyone else was stunned, shocked, and silent, but after a few moments of thought I raised my hand, she called on me, and I made a beautiful speech, in which I tactfully but convincingly pointed out why invalidating the election would be an awful mistake. After I spoke up, several other faculty members had had a chance to collect themselves and supported my arguments. About 2 weeks later, she backed down and accepted our chosen chair. People were very grateful to me and called me "eloquent" and even, in one case, "a rock star." (This was not a small danger. At Brooklyn College, 3 of the more radical chairs were fired at the same time, but at Queensborough we came through with faculty governance and academic freedom still intact, at least partly because I spoke up.)

Well, enough of that. Let me respond to various loose ends.

I'll follow your advice about Rachel.

I'll lead a discussion about Gatto if you want me to, but I think I'd be a bit more interested in talking about a chapter from by about social evolution, how we moved from roaming bands to villages to states to civilization, giving up more freedom at each step and always convincing ourselves we were better off. I don't have the book here, but I'll look it up when I'm back in the city and make sure I'm remembering it properly. Gatto is liberating for my students, who have just come out of K-12 and need to examine the experience, but I'm not sure it would be news for your friends.

Vocabulary: I am flexible; what umbrella term do you think I should use for my fire circle, tarot reading, shamanic drumming, and talking to plants? To me, they are all other ways of knowing, beyond science for the moment. If spiritual is too vague and metaphysical too specific, what works? Transcendent, intuition-reinforcing, meta sapient, I don't know, but there must be some appropriate term, even if we have to make one up.

Taking the long view: I've mostly been studying the long picture, as I see it, but I think I want to write about that in a different letter.

Thanks so much for stimulating me to examine these issues.

So far the only thing you've reported that I actually disapprove of is spanking your cat. I don't think one being should hit another that is 1/20th of its weight, and besides, hitting cats doesn't make them do what you want. You can just raise your voice to let them know when you're angry, or you can spray them with water if you're trying to affect their behavior. And if I had a cat who was a good mouser, I would love it even more! I have lived with 5 cats, and only one, Bella, was a good huntress. She used to bring back dead birds until we put a bell on her. Once I saw a huge flying insect in the house and screamed, and Bella ran right up and ate it. I was so grateful!

What's funny is that I guess Fred & I are brutes from your point of view, because we don't allow any animals besides the cat to live in our house. In this house, mice get poisoned, ticks get suffocated, and you probably don't want to hear what we did to the chipmunk we found in the house 2 nights ago. We spent about half an hour trying to chase it out, but it kept running the wrong way, and finally, well, never mind!

I really see a pretty amusing range of attitudes about animals in this great multicultural nation. At one end is my former yoga teacher, who is such a strict Buddhist that she won't allow an exterminator in her house or even take antibiotics. I feel sorry for her neighbors, because I am sure her roaches migrate into their apartments.

Then there are people like you and Rachel, who empathize with baby mice.

Then there are people like me and Fred, who only empathize with pets, inside the house.

But even we were taken aback when we were hanging out with some of April's friends who were reminiscing about the day when a rogue dog killed their dog and one of them had to get his gun and shoot it.

I think it may have a lot to do with whether one identifies as a city person or a country person. These days the country feels more like real life to us, and you have to be prepared to solve your own problems in the country, and sometimes that means you have to give your husband permission to bash a rodent with a post.

Affectionately yours,

Sorry to be writing lots of short notes, but our printer isn't working, so I can't print out a copy of your letter and work in a systematic manner from that, and I'm just responding to things as I remember them. You don't have to reply to every note. Just write about what energizes you.

Yes, please help me find a better way to refer to my activities. Are they consciousness-expanding activities, perhaps? (As for telepathy, telekinesis, and precognition, I know exactly what each of those terms refers to, they definitely exist, but I don't consider them reliable enough to devote my life to. Just because you haven't experienced them, doesn't mean they don't exist.)

I definitely think that Paul was a brilliant therapist and that he helped you and Laurie and probably lots of other people. I don't think he should have exacted sex as the price for re-parenting you, but nobody is perfect, and I agree that suing him would have been ridiculous. I read a bit of his autobiography when you gave me the link, and it's compelling as a story but strewn with self-justification. Oh well, if he spent 15 years doing conventional therapy and hated it, I can't blame him for trying something else. And I am intrigued by how you changed from an inarticulate, charismatic teenager into an articulate, charismatic adult, and we have to give him some credit for that. But shouldn't some of the credit go to you?

I don't know very much about family therapy. What I was trying to get at was that for very serious problems, like suicidal tendencies or mental retardation, it's best to get the family involved. If something is going to be a problem for a long time, therapists and peers tend to lose interest. I was thinking about the true story of , in which a young woman is found locked in a room without speech development and a scientist takes her into his home for a while to experiment with her, and he does help her communicate, but in the end he loses interest and she ends up back with her inadequate mother. It just seems better to begin by trying to help the whole family, rather than by demonizing some of them. I'll lend you the book if the topic interests you.

I am relieved that you were trying to supervise the counsellors, and of course you have always been working for good. I think the times have changed. In the 60s and 70s, people could drop out of college and find jobs, sometimes even good jobs. Now there are fewer jobs and very few that can support a middle class lifestyle. My students are mostly working class or immigrants, and the pressures that stress them are more financial than emotional. Sometimes they are hungry or can't afford needed medication. One time I just gave a girl $40 for her asthma meds. Usually they don't tell you what is happening, but CUNY did a study a few years ago, and about a third of our students were skipping meals because they couldn't afford them.

Now I will try to get to my project, and how perhaps you can help me. I really am trying to see the Big Picture, as I understand it. I had to try to get some perspective, once I realized how much humans were damaging their environment. I joined a couple of radical environmental groups on Facebook and talked to the people who seemed most intelligent, and I found people who were interesting, compassionate, funny, and generous about answering questions, but after a while I realized I wasn't satisfied with their moral perspective. The most common idea was that civilization was bad, that mankind had made a wrong turn (with industrial civilization, with farming, or even with domesticating animals) and that the survivors of the coming Holocaust would have to return to some previous, more virtuous way of living. I just couldn't get into all this judgementalism, but I was very interested in cultural change, the rise and fall of civilizations, and the evolution of food supplies, and that is mostly what I have been studying for the past 10 years or so.

I probably got my first ideas of ecology from by but here are the books and articles that have influenced me the most recently:

About the Future:

by , in which she travels all over the world interviewing climate scientists and finding out how horrified they are at what is happening. One specifically predicts that civilization will be over by 2100, mainly because desertification on land and acidification of the ocean won't leave anything for large numbers of people to eat. Also, as extreme weather events, like floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires, continue to get stronger and more frequent, it will become harder and harder to preserve any of the physical structures of civilization, like buildings, roads, power plants, etc. This has already begun to happen, and the number of climate refugees, already significant, will continue to rise.

The Darkening Sea, also by Kolbert, in which she explains ocean acidification in more detail.

by and , a short, bitter fiction by a science historian and a journalist, in which an historian of a future civilization looks back at the disastrous choices we made. It's short, so we could read it in book group if people are ever ready for something so tough-minded.

Probably, this future can be changed if we change our current pattern, which is to increase our carbon dioxide emissions every year, but so far there is no sign of the big polluters (China, the U.S., and India) making the necessary changes fast enough.

A Longer Perspective:

I had to get some perspective, so I read a couple of books by (; ) and various works of anthropology (especially Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris). I found Immoderate Greatness by William Ophuls especially useful, as a distillation of the history of civilizations and that book is also short and discussable. My overview is this. Just as species go through evolution, so do human groups. The basic unit of the wandering hunter/gathering band, in which we all evolved and to which we are most suited, becomes obsolete once the band has hunted all the large animals out of the area. Food production has to move to agriculture and domestic animals, or people will starve, so the village becomes the unit of production. As food production becomes better and population increases, war also becomes more of a problem and people have to agglomerate into cities or states for protection. With various ups and downs, and intensification of energy production, empires and mass civilizations come into being. There is very little morality involved in any of this, as far as I can see. It is just a group of social animals, adapting to their geography and environment. But insofar as we succeed, we almost always overdo it, and come to a point where we have produced too much population and over exploited the environment. Then the civilization or the empire collapses. There is not much point in getting angry or outraged about any of this. It's how humans function; civilizations have always risen and fallen. It's only terrifying because nowadays we have a global civilization and there is a real chance that we could make the whole earth unlivable and extinguish not only ourselves, but most other species. The main hope, as I see it, would be to shift consciousness very quickly from our present capitalist paradigm of exploiting the earth's resources as quickly as possible, and move into an earth-centered philosophy, in which people would make decisions to benefit the biosphere as a whole, because only in a functioning biosphere can human civilization evolve and survive. A few people think like this, but not many. If you could help me describe this philosophy more clearly, and give me ideas for how to spread it, I would be extremely grateful.

The problem of getting "spiritual" and "scientific" people to work together is very real is this work. Some people from each camp have some grasp of the big problem, but they have prejudices that make it hard for them to respect each other or work together. I know very few people like us, who respect science but also know that there is some sort of energy that runs through the universe that sometimes gives us extra information. I think we have to break through that and reach a lot of people fast, if there is to be any chance of turning this big battleship of a capitalist culture around before it goes right off the edge of the ocean.

The three top reasons why polarity is so poorly recognized in our time, even though it's "hidden in plain sight", are:

  1. It works itself out a bit differently in different individuals,
  2. We grow up embarrassed about being lopsided and try to hide it,
  3. We allow gender to become destiny.
"From birth to death, gender maps the highway of our life experience. The pronouncement of gender, based on the superficial examination of genitalia, places us on a blue road or a pink road that lead in very different directions."

— April Rose Schneider

I have been working with the polarity model for 45 years and it is sometimes hard even for me to figure out how someone's personality works. ("The map is not the territory," as Korzybski said.) There are so many independent variables:

  1. Has this person any real ambition to contribute to history?
    1. If so, he will craft a unique psychological identity for himself and may eventually become an example of what a new "improved" homo sapiens might look like. Children respond immediately and intuitively to such people. They just seem more alive, more "themselves", less burdened by the baggage that shrinks like to claim is our real if damaged identity. Hippies were like this — until they became stock brokers.
    2. If not, he'll resort to a social identity copied from the parent of the same sex or any other available "role model" — which often means little more than wearing the same clothes and espousing the same attitudes. Sometimes such bland, colorless folks can make contributions to politics, industry, research or philanthropy — think Bill Gates — but never to psychological liberation. They can't face the big questions because it will only show them how little they've settled for in their lives.
  2. How much creative stress is this person willing and/or able to bear in the search for his ultimate destiny?
    1. If a lot, there's no limit on what projects he can inaugurate, and what new pathways he will lead future generations down.
    2. If little or none, he will tend to resent and condemn those who have the courage the climb atop the next hill and view the land beyond. In earlier times he might even have persecuted or destroyed them.
  3. Oh hell, there are too many variables for me to delineate right now!

Back to you. Since I'm a cold-blooded realist, I have little use for empathy. I'm just not good at it. So I rely more on listening quite carefully to whatever people tell me about themselves — as long as it's in a way I can trust and that doesn't set my bullshit detector gonging. So when I encounter someone like you after half-a-century, the first thing I tend to learn is that I never really knew them in the first place and should try to purge all my old and now-inaccurate memories.

(Why inaccurate? Every time you remember an experience you reinterpret its meaning so that, over time, your memories evolve. This is why different witnesses to an event may render completely different accounts a few decades later. If the experience is traumatic or just dramatic, these reinterpretation cycles occur at a rapid pace — which is why the courtroom testimonies of different witnesses can flatly contradict one another on major points after even one week But that's another discussion.)

It is only from your recent letters that I now know that you have indeed led an independent, and not an intimidated, life. And this makes you very special in my eyes. Most of my old friends (probably yours too) became more conformist and more conventional (i. e. intimidated or seduced) as they slowly renounced their youthful idealism. (Paul describes this relinquishment of the adolescent spirit as the cynical adoption of a "lifestyle depression".) It's so important that this not happen to us, Ann, or indeed anyone we nurture or protect. If it does, they will still go through the motions of being human, but the light in their eyes will have gone out.

You have drawn some vivid distinctions between our upbringings that ring true to me. You grew up with civilized educators as parents. I grew up with survivors of a shipwreck called modern life who held on to one another like Richard Parker and Pi. My mother had no intellectual pretensions because she had no intellectual abilities. My father hid his sensitivities in a tiny clothes closet where he kept a small collection of controversial novels by people like Andre Gide and Jean Genet and which he didn't want any of us to know about.

Frank's mother threw her children away after her husband died in a horrible subway accident. After years of untold abuses in foster homes and boarding schools, he was incredibly lacking in all but the most vulgar social skills. He always seemed to have one male friend that he enjoyed selling crackpot ideas to. My favorite was "No woman can love a man." What a silly goose. Then he'd show them a photo of Marilyn Monroe naked that he hid behind his tie rack and brag, sometimes in front of my mother, "This is my inspiration!"

Frank thought he was very clever because he could sell advertisements to local businessmen. But even as a supposedly impressionable child I was unable to consider "selling" to be a socially admirable skill. His idea of showing interest in his son was to routinely ask of any new male friend, "Do you think he's a homosexual?" I didn't know what that word meant, but it sounded like the ugliest thing in the world that could happen to any child, so I always routinely said "No". Slowly the first social skill I developed was in simply getting him away from me.

There were overt attacks, too. One evening I was sitting in the huge chair we kept in front of the TV, in my underwear. My father was sitting on the couch next to me. The doorbell rang. My mother opened the door and said to him, "Two Girl Scouts selling cookies."

An odd look came over his face and he said, "Tell them to come in." I was horrified. I didn't want them to see me like that. He quickly came up with a solution. "Hide in back of the chair so they can't see you."

He bought a few boxes and then, since the big chair I'd been sitting in easily accommodated more than one child, he asked them to sit on it and chat with him for a moment. After some bizarre small talk, which he thought he was so good at — he could have ghost-written Barbara Walter's How to Talk With Practically Anyone About Practically Anything — he stared at me and giggled like some fiend planning the perfect murder. (If you've seen , the evil Gru does the same thing.) They tried to continue the conversation but, after noticing his staring, they turned around and saw me huddling in the corner, utterly and permanently humiliated. Actually, they were as victimized as I was. When adults become sadistic, kids always smell something rotten, and tend not to trust them. Fortunately, unlike me, they never had to meet up with him ever again.

One Christmas Eve he came home drunk from an office party and said to my mother, "I want to fuck you. Now."

"Not in front of the children!" she yelled. He got angry but knew that both she and I would fight back. So he grabbed my little sister by her pony tail and smashed her head against the wall. Gail screamed and my mother ran to her, but no ambulance was summoned. My little sister was never very smart after that.

A few years later he got drunk and abusive at a wedding. The next morning when he had sobered up he cornered me and said, "You understand, Dean, don't you?" I so wanted to icepick his eyes, but instead I quietly said, "Yes" and turned back to what I was doing.

You probably can't imagine the disgust I feel even today remembering what a sad sack this man was. He was intensely interested in the local Little League and became its Vice-President. Yet when I asked if I could play on one of the teams he got embarrassed, snickered, and said, "Oh, you really think that would be appropriate?" Paul always thought he was a closet homosexual. I'm beginning to think that he taught me how to drive a car at the age of 10 only because he enjoyed feeling my cute ass squirm all over his crotch.

I'm sorry, Ann, but these horrors are still in me after all these years and only when I'm gone will the world be rid of them. Frank died in 1977 but as far as I'm concerned he's not dead enough for me even now. In the early 80's, my sister told me about how he kept pornography in the trunk of his car but forbade her to ask him any questions about falling in love.

"Did he molest you?" she asked. "No, never," I said. I should have explained that parents who have found the joys of sadism no longer need the joys of sex.

Aside from isolated incidents, he didn't routinely abuse us. Both of them ignored both of us. And when I started winning math awards at the age of 12 all he wanted to do was to wear a proper business suit and stand next to me in photographs so he could pretend that his splendid parenting had had something to do with my accomplishment.

The good news? Deciding to be nothing like him, deciding never to create a "pretend family" as his was, meant that I could forge an identity for myself that was my own and, eventually nurtured by the encouragement that Paul (my real father) provided, a certainty.

As I look back I find I liked my mother more. She had no use for children and was clearly just waiting for us to leave the nest, but this actually aligned well with my own secret plans. And she also sympathized with the plight of those who, like her, yearned for freedom. When I didn't want to go fishing because my father's sadism towards all living creatures repulsed me, it was always to her that I could turn to convince him that there was a good reason I couldn't accompany him on his holy quest for the manhood he never quite found. Towards the end of her life she sighed and said, "If I could have been an animal, I would have wanted to be a bird. They know what freedom is." Although not an intellectual she was surprisingly careful to use correct grammar.

I don't know what good our mutual reminiscences of childhood miseries can do in this context. Like Henry Ford I believe that "history is bunk" and that about all you can say about it is "This shit really fucking happened. Let's see if we can do better." This is why I tell people, "Don't read history and weep. Write history and laugh." But it's probably good just to get this stuff out of the way so you and I can focus more on what's happening now in our lives.

I must add, however, that I was so impressed by how you challenged your college president at that public meeting that I think it would be disrespectful of me to say anything more about it than "Bravissimo, Ann!"

Knowledge and skills belong to all of us, regardless of polarity. All of us can learn how to think and how to act. The difference is that feminines develop new insights while masculines have their hands full just learning what feminines tell them, and that masculines can develop new forms of mastery while feminines have their hands full just following what masculines show them.

Thinking (hiding) is not really dangerous for me. It's just not something that comes naturally. So I take my cues from master thinkers like Paul. Acting (shining) is not really dangerous for you. It's just not something that comes naturally. So take your cues from master builders like [insert your favorite hero here].

What would I call your drumming and related activities? First of all, I don't believe in the "name therapy" which conventional shrinks like to sell gullible patients (and their parents). "Name therapy" is where the shrink comes up with a new "improved" and often pathologized name for experiences the patient hasn't had the slightest trouble describing in quite ordinary language. (Another spongy therapy is what Paul and I used to call "geography therapy". This is where the patient is convinced that his cure lies in simply moving to another city.) I think the names you use in describing what you do are your names and therefor entirely appropriate. To improve them would deface you.

The Citizen's Commission on Human Rights, founded by (author of and one of Paul's students) has produced a public service announcement on how kids get labeled with bogus 'mental disorders' when they already know perfectly well how to describe themselves, thank you. The tag line is "Let them choose their own labels." It's only two minutes long, so please watch it now because it's very relevant to what I'm trying to convey to you in these letters: .

For most of his life, Szasz maintained that "the child psychiatrist is one of the most dangerous enemies not only of children, but also of adults who care for the two most precious and most vulnerable things in life: children and liberty."

"What I think" of the activities you describe, on the other hand — how I understand the meaning and value they have for you — may be different from how you think about them. Here's how I see the importance of what you're doing: Feminines tend to exhaust themselves by nurturing others too much, and then need to decompress by engaging in simple fun activities. Masculines tend to exhaust themselves by protecting others too much, then need to "rest up" by enjoying simple pleasurable hobbies.

We know how you find R&R. Rachel likes to take walks, sketch and make small talk with strangers. (They don't do this in Germany.) Paul liked to sew sweaters (that we all had to pretend we wanted). At Christmas he gave each of us a home-made rum-soaked fruit cake (which we all had to praise). Roughly speaking, feminines suspend their critical faculties and just "go with the flow" of group harmony for a few hours or days. I find R&R by "forgetting all my problems and getting happy", usually by adoring my cat, sorting my collection of dinosaur skeleton postcards, or curling up with a children's book. In fact I don't even think of them as children's books but as "simple books". I mean, why should children have all the fun?? Sometimes I'll even engage in my favored form of meditation, which I call "taking a nap".

Most people learning Paul's ideas assume that these "two-dimensional" fun and pleasure pastimes are not as important as our "three-dimensional" creative projects, but actually they are equally important for human thriving. Creativity and "fun and pleasure" need to be balanced in life. Without fun and pleasure, creativity becomes "creativity poisoning" and "oppressive stress" and can lead to suicide and worse. Without creativity, fun and pleasure become mere hedonism and can lead to all sorts of perversity and addition problems such as pollute the "Christopher Street" community to this day and which likes to think of drug abuse as "recreational psychedelics" and craven promiscuity as "recreational sex".

The takeaway here is that agreeing with me that together we can forge a significantly superior vocabulary to that of the streets will not help you in any way to communicate with folks you are associating with when you engage in such activities. All of us use different vocabularies with different associates. I don't talk tech with my polarity friends, and I don't talk polarity with my violin playmates. Humans are so flexible that they don't even realize when they're switching these linguistic gears, even though they may in fact switch several times in one conversation. But you mustn't assume that someone understands a vocabulary they have no training in.

I smiled when I read that "Just because you haven't experienced them [your experiences], doesn't mean they don't exist." I'm afraid the indeterminacy problem is bigger than that. In fact just because you have experienced them, doesn't mean that they do exist. Tragicomically, it all depends of what your definition of "is" is. This is why you must come to our September meeting, where Tony Hardy will introduce us to phenomenology and explain exactly who among us knows what there is to know about which things — and why. His insights, based on those of Ernst Cassirer and many others, effectively demolish the naive 19th-century reductionism that cognitive psychologists still seem in the thrall of. As said in the preface to Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain (2009): The idea that the only genuinely scientific study of consciousness would be one that identifies consciousness with events in the nervous system is a bit of outdated reductionism. It is comparable to the idea that depression is a brain disease. In one sense, that is obviously true. There are neural signatures of depression. Direct action on the brain — in the form of drug therapy — can influence depression. But in another sense, it is obviously not true. It is simply impossible to understand why people get depressed — or why this individual here and now is depressed — in neural terms alone. Depression happens to living people with real life histories facing real life events, and it happens not only against the background of these individual histories but also against the background of the phylogenetic history of the species. The dogma that depression is a brain disease serves the interests of drug companies, no doubt; it also serves to destigmatize the struggle with depression, which is a good thing. But it is false.

I doubt Paul was a brilliant therapist. He dispensed with what we eventually called (derisively) "supportive therapy" — "I'm okay, You're okay" pablum — because that's what most patients want. He tried to teach some of them what a scientific approach to human nature might look like, but this was like teaching entomology to ants for most of them. Paul was a scientist, an educator, and a writer. He challenged people, he didn't baby them. He wouldn't have talked to Ethan about wearing diapers. When I was with him I didn't "feel" any better about myself than I had ever felt. But I was learning important insights that would illuminate the rest of my life, and this was vastly more important to me.

"Shouldn't some of the credit for changing from an inarticulate teenager into an articulate adult go to me?" No. It was my destiny. And by that I mean only that I couldn't have become anything other than what you see without betraying my nature and prematurely ending it all. I am what you see because it was a prior condition for existing. Since I am a living creature I can't take credit for wanting to exist. Nor do I deserve credit for having a high I.Q., going to the Bronx High School of Science, or being able to write fugues. What I do want credit for is passing French in the 12th grade. I really had to bust my ass for that "D"! I want to encourage you as much as I can to go full throttle on your new project to change the world. I agree with most of what you've learned from the books you cite. But my real motive is selfish. I have no idea whether you will triumph or even feel triumphant about any presumed effect you may eventually decide you have personally had on future generations. I have no idea whether the books you cite will turn out in a few centuries to have been on the right track or were indeed only intellectual fads. But I do know that if you don't try to change the world you will hate yourself. And if you do try, you are bound to learn important and unpredictable lessons about "life, the universe and everything". So I am officially tossing you out of the nest because I have faith that you can fly, and that when you next fly past my window you will be more beautiful than ever. Sitting in a room thinking can only teach you about the I. Only by rolling up your sleeves and marching into the marketplace can you learn anything about the Thou.

Compared to some people, you and I have both led relatively sheltered lives. But all of us need people of the opposite type to grow. In his first book, Paul said, Love is a hungry emotion which requires the vividness of an experiential ideal to remain healthy; power is an impelling attitude, requiring the unfailing plasticity of a feeling and responsive reality in order to accept domestication by social forces. Love and power are a natural pair; put apart, love sickens and power runs wild.

In the modern world it's a dead end to just curl up with a loved one and enjoy reading in a hammock or building a house in the woods. Paul called this "nest feathering". There is more to life than this. There has to be. Civilization is only half-built and there is so much left to do. So go out and link arms with folks you know little about and may not even like much. Learn everything they can teach you, and teach them everything you know. Everything depends on our living increasingly deeper and broader interconnected lives with our fellow humans.

"If you could help me describe this philosophy more clearly, and give me ideas for how to spread it, I would be extremely grateful." Humble simplicity is always a better ice-breaker than pretentious complexity, especially at the start of what might become a real conversation. Just tell them, "I'm going to make the world a better place. Wanna help me?"

This approach is not outlandish as it may sound. As you engage in this crusade, Ann, please remember that I have already told you that I'm going to make the world a better place. And that you've already agreed to help me.

Rachel and I saw a surprisingly good movie on Netflix called "Hostage". I identified with one of the chief villains because "there but for fortune" might have gone I. (Did I just end a sentence with a preposition??) He had the really cool nickname "Mars", which turned out to be a quite logical abbreviation of his real name "Marshall". Did I ever tell you what my real first name was? Anyway, I'm thinking of changing my name to Mars. (Maybe then they'll fear me!!!)

Both Andrew Solomon and Marvin Harris are asking good questions and I would like it if you could lead us in a discussion of their ideas, either together or one at a time. Can you provide us with digital copies? My guys are spoiled and don't like to buy books. Please decide what excerpt(s) you want us to read and when you'd like to lead us. Tony Hardy is already scheduled for September, but any month after that is open.

I finally have some time to acknowledge your last, powerful letter. The section about your childhood in that "fake family" was harrowing, but I think it was important for me to hear about that in order to understand you and your passion to improve the world at a deeper level. Yes, of course you need to do whatever you can to help humans improve their behavior and their understanding. Sometimes I think we would be much better off to abandon the nuclear family altogether and live on kibbutzim or communes. Let children grow up with their age-mates and not have such intense relationships with parents. The nuclear family is more of an aberration than a norm in history. Most families have been multigenerational conglomerates in which kids could hang out with other kids or find an uncle or a grandfather to follow if the father was a jerk.

For me, I didn't have much ambition after the fire. I wanted to be happy and normal, and for a long time I felt that way: taking care of Fred & April, teaching my students to write, volunteering with the PTA at whatever school April was in. My ambition to do something now comes out of my terrible fear of what the young people will have to deal with in the remainder of the century. I work at reducing that fear, because I don't want to destroy my health or my decision-making capability, and I find that gardening and foraging are good stress reducers. I don't feel like I have much choice; I can't possibly ignore the destruction of the biosphere and of civilization (I believe they are interdependent: you can't have one without the other, and if present trends continue, they will both be gone by the end of the century, and we'll just have roving bands of humans fleeing the giant hurricanes, the dust storms, the wild fires.) So I do whatever I can think of, and my anxiety goes down for a while. I tried joining a lot of online groups, sending them money, emailing and calling decision makers. Nothing much changed, so I upped my game. I spread awareness about climate change, taught it to my students, told all my friends. Nothing much changed, except I lost a couple of friends (nobody likes to hear bad news!). In my present intensification, I have joined CCL, I go to Washington to lobby politicians, and I have found a pretty good supportive environmental community on Facebook.

I've been working a lot on Facebook since you told me to go ahead full throttle. I found a masculine to work with, Jim, who's an expert on soil, composting, manure, and similar things. He has had a splendid career, traveling all over the world trying to solve environmental problems. We were both active in a discussion group with which we were dissatisfied, and we agreed to start a new discussion group that would focus on environmental issues and be both more civil and more rigorous than the other group. Jim gave me the name "Generative Futures," which we both love. We wanted a concept that was more positive than "sustainable," that extended the idea that a future aligned with ecology could be better and more rewarding than our present consumption-driven lifestyle.

We both added our friends whom we thought would be interested to the group, so we have 77 members officially. About 12 people are participating very actively, and about another dozen are reading and joining in occasionally, and that is enough to make it an absorbing experience. I have been collecting interesting people, many with strong science backgrounds, on Facebook for years, and now I finally get a chance to encourage them to engage with each other, to come up with solutions, to analyze ideas. It's pretty thrilling! No scientist myself, I just ask questions, and I am learning a lot, and of course the other non-scientists are probably learning as they read, too. We had a series of interesting discussions about why many people (like Rachel!) reject science. I am doing some easy getting-to-know-each-other activities for now, like an introduction thread and a what-are-your-most-influential-books thread, but eventually I want to discuss how to teach critical thinking, how to teach systems thinking (which my Australian permaculture educator thinks is essential), and how to define and spread environmental philosophy. I also did a light spiritual thread: what positive spiritual activity do you enjoy? People talked about yoga, meditation, etc. I know some of them pray, but no one has had the courage to mention that yet. Eventually I want to talk about the difficulty in communication between spiritual and scientific people, but not yet. I am starting to think that an important benefit of positive spiritual practices is fear reduction, but I am not ready to analyze this whole topic yet. One more point about the group: I am not the only person starting threads. Everyone is welcome to post, and Jim especially is posting lots of interesting things, such as looking at the crisis in the Middle East from an environmental point of view, which got lots of response from the permaculture people. So far there is only one person whom I really want whom I can't get. Joe is a developer in the newly emerging field of Cultural Evolution, which sounds like it may be a key concept, but he seems to be just too busy outside of Facebook to participate much in Generative Futures. Maybe I'll ask him to recommend a retired Cultural Evolutionist with more time on his hands, except that I think it's a new field and there are no retired CE's heh, heh

You seem to have misunderstood my vocabulary question, so I'm forging ahead as best as I can. Of course I know how to talk to pagans about being pagan, and I can also talk in a scientific mode and sound rational to scientists. I really respect scientists, but I'm not a scientific person, and I need a way to convey that without making myself sound like a flake. (Or maybe I am a flake, and I should just admit that my activities are woo-woo!) Someone in Generative Futures suggested that some people are "intuitive thinkers," and that sounds like me. (Other people are "analytic thinkers," and that sounds like you.) You can show me 30 scientific studies that say that something is right, but if my gut says it's wrong, I am better off going with my gut. Your idea that fire circle or shamanic drumming are relaxation activities for me is wrong. These things keep me connected with how I best perceive reality, which is a different matter and essential in a different way. I don't feel relaxed after those activities, either. I feel energized, even wired, and I may have to do some visualizations to drain the surplus energy.

My relaxation activities are petting my aged cat, reading, watching movies, seeing plays, gardening and foraging. They are fun, but if for some reason I couldn't do them, I could just substitute a new set of activities.

(I don't think the analytic vs. intuitive dichotomy has anything to do with polarity; I think it's just a different axis. The woman who leads our women's fire circle seems both masculine and intuitive to me, while I would be feminine and intuitive. You are both active and analytic, I think, and I know some people who are both feminine and analytic. I have about 3 high-functioning autistic friends, and they all seem both feminine and analytic.)

Anyway, thanks for encouraging me to start the group!