Category: Excerpt

“It is when your practice is rather greedy that you become discouraged with it. So you should be grateful that you have a sign or warning signal to show you the weak point in your practice.

Here are several poor ways of practice that you should understand. Usually when you practice music, you become very idealistic, and you set up an ideal or goal which you strive to attain and fulfill. This is absurd.

When you are idealistic, you have some gaining idea within yourself; by the time you attain your ideal or goal, your gaining idea will create another ideal.

So as long as your practice is based on a gaining idea, and you practice music in an idealistic way, you will have no time actually to attain your ideal.

Moreover, you will be sacrificing the meat of your practice. Because your attainment is always ahead, you will always be sacrificing yourself now for some ideal in the future. You end up with nothing.

This is absurd; it is not adequate practice at all. But even worse than this idealistic attitude is to practice music in competition with someone else.

This is a poor, shabby kind of practice.”

– Shunryu Suzuki (adaptation JC)

“Let me put it in this way, “I don’t have it, if you don’t have it”.  Because, I have it, only to the extent that I can give it away; “that I can give it up, and to all others.”

But, in order that people may master these disciplines, (and this is the responsibility of the older generations) it must be understood that working on the disciplines, is fun! And this is the task of all good teachers. 

All good, really gifted and great teachers are people who never have to resort in their classes to artificial methods of imposing discipline.  They need no proctors, they need no punishments, they need no bribes, because the good teacher is the person who makes the work of learning the discipline so completely fascinating, that the student is embroiled.  The reason being, that learning a discipline is not a matter of forcing yourself.  

And here the English language leaves a little bit to be desired.  We have a paucity of words for effort, for application, for concentration… that we can talk about when we’re talking with children, “You must apply yourself!”

Now, it’s perfectly true, nothing in the way of a skill will be achieved without practice.  But, if practice is strained, still nothing will be achieved by it, except resentment.  Many a child learns to hate the violin or the piano because it was drummed into him, “This is what you got to do! You got to apply yourself to it!”, …driving it home. 

But, on the other hand, if there is a way of fascinating a child with the discipline of any musical instrument or what have you, then they can apply themselves day after day, after day, after day, and be fascinated with the discipline. 

So, this is the skill of the teacher…through skillful means to get the student to love the art because, (remember this principle), if your student does not learn to love the discipline, he will never be any good at what you’re teaching him.

Now, you may know that certain kinds of scholars do work that most of us would think very tedious.  Let’s suppose I take a field about which I know a few smatterings, which is the study of Chinese.  Chinese scholarship is very difficult.  You have an enormous amount of characters to study and you have to look up things in dictionaries and consult volumes of this, and volumes of that.  But the true scholar is a person who just loves doing that!  He’ll spend a whole afternoon going after one character through all sorts of things, sifting this reference and that reference, and he will be having more fun than someone at a bowling alley, doing just that! 

And from the standpoint of an external observer, who has no particular interest in this, they’ll say, “Oh how hard he’s working!”  

You know, in my private life, I must confess to you, I’ve had a terrible time with this because I love my work and people who had absolutely no comprehension or interest in what I’m doing would wonder, “how do I keep up the pace?”  “how can I possibly do this, that and the other?”  I love it! 

But then there are other people who say, “You never do a lick of work in your life!  You’re playing all the time! Just goofing off!  It’s too easy for you because you love it!”  But that’s the only way to get it done, and done well!  

Because if you have something that is, say a good marriage; a good marriage is not the result of forcing yourself into that marriage.  Are you seriously supposing that if you say to your husband or wife, “Darling do you really love me?” And the partner answers, “I’m trying my best to do so.”…?  This is simply not a satisfactory marriage. We are not going to get beautiful work by mere effort, “against the grain.”

When you could tell, a cook instantly, by tasting one mouthful of a dish whether it was cooked “out of a sense of duty” or cooked “out of love”.

Now, a person who cooks out of true love will of course encounter days on which it is difficult.  But somehow, the overall love of the art will manage to get him through those days when it’s difficult.  And so with marriage, and so with the Mastery of any other art.  

But, it is on the end of the older people.  It is up to the teachers and the parents to present the disciplines of life as something that; not just that, “you ought to know”, but as something that it is beautiful to understand!”

– Alan Watts

“(Practice) does not have to be hard labor. Just allow your body and mind to rest…Don’t struggle.

Practice in a way that does not tire you out, but gives your body, emotions, and consciousness a chance to rest.”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

“So, how is the mind to be totally free from envy?

Because envy inevitably brings conflict.

Envy is a state in which there is no creativity, and a man who wishes to find out what is creativity must obviously be free from all envy;

from all comparison;

from the urges to be, to become.”

– J. Krishnamurti

THE ORGANIZATION OF THOUGHT

Educational and Scientific

BY A. N. WHITEHEAD, Sc.D., F.R.S.

There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations.

The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus. You cannot ‘postpone its life until you have sharpened it’.

Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter, must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow.

All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of the mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. There is no royal road to learning through an airy path of brilliant generalizations.

We now return to my previous point, that theoretical ideas should always find important applications within the pupil’s curriculum. This is not an easy doctrine to apply, but a very hard one. It contains within itself the problem of keeping knowledge alive, of preventing it from becoming inert, which is the central problem of all education.

The best procedure will depend on several factors, none of which can be neglected, namely, the genius of the teacher, the intellectual type of the pupils, their prospects in life, the opportunities offered by the immediate surroundings of the school, and allied factors of this sort. It is for this reason that the uniform external examination is so deadly.

Choose some important applications of your theoretical subject; and study them concurrently with the systematic theoretical exposition. Keep the theoretical exposition short and simple, but let it be strict and rigid; so far as it goes. It should not be too long for it easily to be known with thoroughness and accuracy. The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable. Also the theory should not be muddled up with the practice. The child should have no doubt when it is proving and when it is utilizing.  My point is that what is proved should be utilized, and that what is utilized should—so far as is practicable—be proved. I am far from asserting that proof and utilization are the same thing.

I would only remark that the understanding which we want is an understanding of an insistent present. The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. No more deadly harm can be done to young minds than by depreciation of the present. The present contains all that there is.  It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future. At the same time it must be observed that an age is no less past if it existed two hundred years ago than if it existed two thousand years ago.

“You may think that if there is no purpose or no goal in our practice, we will not know what to do. But there is a way.

The way to practice without having any goal is to limit your activity, or to be concentrated on what you are doing in this moment. Instead of having some particular object in mind, you should limit your activity.

When your mind is wandering about elsewhere you have no chance to express yourself. But if you limit your activity to what you can do just now, in this moment, then you can express fully YOUR true music.”

– Shunryu Suzuki (adaptation JC)

THE ORGANIZATION OF THOUGHT

Educational and Scientific

BY A. N. WHITEHEAD, Sc.D., F.R.S.

What is the ‘first commandment’ to be obeyed in any educational scheme?

It is this : Do not teach too many subjects.

The second command is this : What you teach, teach thoroughly. 

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty, and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore…

We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self-development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by (parents) before the age of twelve. 

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call ” inert ideas “—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. 

Education with inert ideas is not only useless : it is, above all things, harmful: Corruptio optimi, pessima…

…Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning. 

Let the main ideas which are introduced into a child’s education be few and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible.

The child should make them her own, and should understand their application here and now in the circumstances of her actual life. From the very beginning of her education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which she has to make, is that general ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through her life, which is her life. 

I mean ” understanding ” in the sense in which it is used in the French proverb, ” To understand all, is to forgive all.” 

But if education is not useful, what is it? 

It is useful, because understanding is useful. 

I would only remark that the understanding which we want is an understanding of an insistent present. The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.