Love Poems - Rumi -

"Persian Beauty"

"My body, my senses, my mind, hunger for your taste "

Love Poems

- Rumi -

Your fragrant breath

like the morning breeze

has come to the stillness of the garden

You have breathed new life into me

I have become your sunshine

and also your shadow

My soul is screaming in ecstasy

Every fiber of my being

is in love with you

Your effulgence

has lit a fire in my heart

and you have made radiant

for me

the earth and sky

My arrow of love

has arrived at the target

I am in the house of mercy

and my heart

is a place of prayer” 

🍷

I desire you

more than food

and drink

My body

my senses

my mind

hunger for your taste

I can sense your presence

in my heart

although you belong

to all the world

I wait

with silent passion

for one gesture

one glance

from you” 

🍷

Know that my beloved in hidden from everyone

Know that she is beyond the belief of all beliefs

Know that in my heart she is as clear as the moon

Know that she is the life in my body and in my soul” 

🍷 

I'm drenched 

in the flood 

which has yet to come

I'm tied up

in the prison

that has yet to exist

Not having played 

the game of chess

I'm already the checkmate

Not having tasted

a single cup of your wine

I'm already drunk

Not having entered 

the battlefield

I'm already wounded and slain

I no longer 

know the difference

between image and reality

Like the shadow

I am

and

I am not

🍷🍷

The Storm -Gibran-

"Watch in Full Screen"

The Storm 

-Gibran-

.... He walked toward the door of the hermitage, where he stood looking into the depths of the night, and then exclaimed, as if addressing the storm, 

“You waken the depths of the soul but you cannot show the passions there how to speak; those who are ignorant of the storm cannot know its secrets nor find the key to liberate the rages and longings that trouble his soul.”

*

.... Before going out into the storm, he said, “If ever you are caught by surprise in a storm again when you are in this neighbourhood, please do not hesitate to take refuge in this hermitage. But I hope that you come to know yourself so that you will be able to love storms, not fear them … there is love in the darkness, my brother.”

***

.... ومشى إذ ذاك نحو باب الصومعة ناظراً إلى أعماق الليل ثم هتف كأنه يخاطب العاصفة : هي يقظة في أعماق النفس فمن يعرفها لا يستطيع إظهارها بالكلام ومن لم يعرفها لا ولن يدرك أسرارها .

*

.... ثم قال ببطء : أنا ذاهب الآن للتجول في العاصفة ، وهي عادة أتمتع بلذتها في الخريف وفي الشتاء ... هاك إبريق القهوة واللفائف ، وإن طلبت نفسك الخمر تجدها في الجرَّة . وإذا شئت النوم تجد اللحف والمساند في تلك القرنة .

قال هذا والتف بجبة سوداء كثيفة ثم زاد مبتسماً : أرجوك أن توصد باب الصومعة عندما تذهب في الصباح لأنني سأصرف الغد في غابة الأرز .

ثم سار نحو الباب وتناول من جانبه عكازاً طويلاً وقال : إذا فاجأتك العاصفة ثانية وأنت في هذه النواحي فلا تتأخر عن الالتجاء إلى هذه الصومعة . ولكنني أرجو أن تعلم نفسك حب العواصف لا الخوف منها . . . مساء الخير يا أخي .

وخرج إلى الليل مسرعاً .

Kindness is like snow - Kahlil Gibran -

Kindness is like snow. It beautifies everything it covers

- Kahlil Gibran -

Jesus , The Crucified .. - Gibran Khalil Gibran -

Jesus , The Crucified ..

- Gibran Khalil Gibran -

Today, and on this same day of each year, man is startled from his deep slumber and stands before the phantoms of the Ages, looking with tearful eyes toward Mount Calvary to witness Jesus the Nazarene nailed on the Cross.... But when the day is over and eventide comes, human kinds return and kneel praying before the idols, erected upon every hilltop, every prairie, and every barter of wheat.

Today, the Christian souls ride on the wing of memories and fly to Jerusalem. There they will stand in throngs, beating upon their bosoms, and staring at Him, crowned with a wreath of thorns, stretching His arms before heaven, and looking from behind the veil of Death into the depths of Life....

But when the curtain of night drops over the stage of the day and the brief drama is concluded, the Christians will go back in groups and lie down in the shadow of oblivion between the quilts of ignorance and slothfulness.

On this one day of each year, the philosophers leave their dark caves, and the thinkers their cold cells, and the poets their imaginary arbors, and all stand reverently upon that silent mountain, listening to the voice of a young man saying of His killers, "Oh Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing."

But as dark silence chokes the voices of the light, the philosophers and the thinkers and the poets return to their narrow crevices and shroud their souls with meaningless pages of parchment.

The women who busy themselves in the splendour of Life will bestir themselves today from their cushions to see the sorrowful woman standing before the Cross like a tender sapling before the raging tempest; and when they approach near to her, they will hear a deep moaning and a painful grief.

The young men and women who are racing with the torrent of modern civilization will halt today for a moment, and look backward to see the young Magdalen washing with her tears the blood stains from the feet of a Holy Man suspended between Heaven and Earth; and when their shallow eyes weary of the scene they will depart and soon laugh.

On this day of each year, Humanity wakes with the awakening of Spring, and stands crying below the suffering Nazarene; then she closes her eyes and surrenders herself to a deep slumber. But Spring will remain awake, smiling and progressing until merged into Summer, dressed in scented golden raiment. Humanity is a mourner who enjoys lamenting the memories and heroes of the Ages.... If Humanity were possessed of understanding, there would be rejoicing over their glory. Humanity is like a child standing in glee by a wounded beast. Humanity laughs before the strengthening torrent which carries into oblivion the dry branches of the trees, and sweeps away with determination all things not fastened by strength.

Humanity looks upon Jesus the Nazarene as a poor-born Who suffered misery and humiliation with all of the weak. And He is pitied, for Humanity believes He was crucified painfully.... And all that Humanity offers to Him is crying and wailing and lamentation. For centuries Humanity has been worshipping weakness in the person of the Saviour.

The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of strength.

Jesus never lived a life of fear, nor did He die suffering or complaining.... He lived as a leader; He was crucified as a crusader; He died with a heroism that frightened His killers and tormentors.

Jesus was not a bird with broken wings; He was a raging tempest who broke all crooked wings. He feared not His persecutors nor His enemies. He suffered not before His killers. Free and brave and daring He was. He defied all despots and oppressors. He saw the contagious pustules and amputated them.... He muted Evil and He crushed Falsehood and He choked Treachery.

Jesus came not from the heart of the circle of Light to destroy the homes and build upon their ruins the convents and monasteries. He did not persuade the strong man to become a monk or a priest, but He came to send forth upon this earth a new spirit, with power to crumble the foundation of any monarchy built upon human bones and skulls.... He came to demolish the majestic palaces, constructed upon the graves of the weak, and crush the idols, erected upon the bodies of the poor. Jesus was not sent here to teach the people to build magnificent churches and temples amidst the cold wretched huts and dismal hovels.... He came to make the human heart a temple, and the soul and altar, and the mind a priest.

These were the missions of Jesus the Nazarene, and these are the teachings for which He was crucified. And if Humanity were wise, she would stand today and sing in strength the song of conquest and the hymn of triumph.

Oh, Crucified Jesus, Who are looking sorrowfully from Mount Calvary at the sad procession of the Ages, and hearing the clamour of the dark nations, and understanding the dreams of Eternity... Thou art, on the Cross, more glorious and dignified than one thousand kings upon one thousand thrones in one thousand empires....

Thou art, in the agony of death, more powerful than one thousand generals in one thousand wars....

With Thy sorrows, Thou art more joyous than Spring with its flowers....

With Thy suffering, Thou art more bravely silent than the crying angels of heaven....

Before Thy lashers, Thou art more resolute than the mountain of rock....

Thy wreath of thorns is more brilliant and sublime than the crow of Bahram.... The nails piercing Thy hands are more beautiful than the sceptre of Jupiter....

The spatters of blood upon Thy feet are more resplendent than the necklace of Ishtar.

Forgive the weak who lament Thee today, for they do not know how to lament themselves....

Forgive them, for they do not know that Thou has conquered death with death, and bestowed life upon the dead....

Forgive them, for they do not know that Thy strength still awaits them....

Forgive them, for they do not know that every day is Thy day.

يسوع المصلوب - جبران خليل جبرا

يسوع المصلوب

 - جبران خليل جبران -

اليوم وفي مثل هذا اليوم من كل سنة تستيقظ الإنسانية من رقادها العميق، وتقف أمام أشباح الأجيال، ناظرة بعيون مغلفة بالدموع نحو جبل الجلجلة لترى يسوع الناصري معلقاً على خشبة الصليب... وعندما تغيب الشمس عن مآتي النهار تعود الإنسانية فتركع مصلية أمام الأصنام المنتصبة على قمة كل رابية وفي سفح كل جبل.

اليوم تقود الذكرى أرواح المسيحيين من جميع أقطار العالم إلى جوار أورشليم، فيقفون هناك صفوفاً صفوفاً قارعين صدورهم، محدقين إلى شبح مكلل بالأشواك، باسط ذراعيه أمام اللانهاية، ناظر من وراء حجاب الموت إلى أعماق الحياة... ولكن لا تسدل ستائر الليل على مسارح هذا النهار حتى يعود المسيحيون فيضطجعوا جماعاتٍ جماعاتٍ في ظلال النسيان بين لحف الجهالة والخمول.

وفي مثل هذا اليوم من كل سنة يترك الفلاسفة كهوفهم المظلمة والمفكرون صوامعهم الباردة والشعراء أوديتهم الخيالية... ويقفون جميعهم على جبل عال، صامتين متهيبين مصغين إلى صوت فتىً يقول لقاتليه: «يا أبتاه، اغفر لهم لأنهم لا يدرون ما يفعلون»... ولكن لا تكتنف السكينة أصوات النور حتى يعود الفلاسفة والمفكرون والشعراء فيكفنوا أرواحهم بصفحات الكتب البالية.

إن النساء المشغولات ببهجة الحياة، المشغوفات بالحلي والحلل، يخرجن اليوم من منازلهن ليشاهدن المرأة الحزينة الواقفة أمام الصليب وقوف الشجرة اللينة أمام عواصف الشتاء، ويقتربن منها ليسمعن أنينها العميق وغصاتها الأليمة.

أما الفتيان والصبايا الراكضون مع تيار الأيام إلى حيث لا يدرون، فيقفون اليوم هنيهة، ويلتفتون إلى الوراء ليروا الصبية المجدلية تغسل بدموعها قطرات الدماء عن قدمي رجل منتصب بين الأرض والسماء... و لكن عندما تمل عيونهم النظر إلى هذا المشهد يتحولون مسرعين ضاحكين.

في مثل هذا اليوم من كل سنة... تستيقظ الإنسانية بيقظة الربيع، وتقف باكية لأوجاع الناصري، ثم تطبق أجفانها وتنام نوماً عميقاً... أما الربيع فيظل مستيقظاً مبتسماً سائراً حتى يصير صيفاً مذهب الملابس معطر الأذيال.

الإنسانية امرأة يلذ لها البكاء والنحيب على أبطال الأجيال... ولو كانت الإنسانية رجلاً، لفرحت بمجدهم وعظمتهم.

الإنسانية طفلة تقف متأوهةً بجانب الطائر الذبيح... ولكنها تخشى الوقوف أمام العاصفة الهائلة التي تهصر بمسيرها الأغصان اليابسة، وتجرف بعزمها الأقذار المنتنة.

الإنسانية ترى يسوع الناصري مولوداً كالفقراء، عائشاً كالمساكين، مهاناً كالضعفاء، مصلوباً كالمجرمين... فتبكيه وترثيه وتندبه وهذا كل ما تفعله لتكريمه.

منذ تسعة عشر جيلاً والبشر يعبدون الضعف بشخص يسوع، ويسوع كان قوياً ولكنهم لا يفهمون معنى القوة الحقيقية.

ما عاش يسوع مسكيناً خائفاً، ولم يمت شاكياً متوجعاً... بل عاش ثائراً، وصلب متمرداً، ومات جباراً...

لم يكن يسوع طائراً مكسور الجناحين... بل كان عاصفةً هوجاء تكسر بهبوبها جميع الأجنحة المعوجة...

لم يجئ يسوع من وراء الشفق الأزرق ليجعل الألم رمزاً للحياة... بل جاء ليجعل الحياة رمزاً للحق والحرية...

لم يخف يسوع مضطهديه، ولم يخش أعداءه، ولم يتوجع أمام قاتليه... بل كان حراً على رؤوس الأشهاد، جريئاً أمام الظلم والاستبداد؛ يرى البثور الكريهة فيبضعها، ويسمع الشر متكلماً فيخرسه، ويلتقي الرياء فيصرعه.

لم يهبط يسوع من دائرة النور الأعلى ليهدم المنازل ويبني من حجارتها الأديرة والصوامع، ويستهوي الرجال الأشداء ليقودهم قسوساً ورهباناً... بل جاء ليبث في فضاء هذا العالم روحاً جديدةً قويةً؛ تقوض قوائم العروش المرفوعة على الجماجم، وتهدم القصور المتعالية فوق القبور، وتسحق الأصنام المنصوبة على أجساد الضعفاء المساكين.

لم يجئ يسوع ليعلم الناس بناء الكنائس الشاهقة والمعابد الضخمة في جوار الأكواخ الحقيرة والمنازل الباردة المظلمة... بل جاء ليجعل قلب الإنسان هيكلاً، ونفسه مذبحاً، وعقله كاهناً.

هذا ما صنعه يسوع الناصري، وهذه هي المبادئ التي صلب لأجلها مختاراً... ولو عقل البشر لوقفوا اليوم فرحين متهللين منشدين أهازيج الغلبة والانتصار...

وأنت أيها الجبار المصلوب، الناظر من أعالي الجلجلة إلى مواكب الأجيال، السامع ضجيج الأمم، الفاهم أحلام الأبدية، أنت على خشبة الصليب المضرجة بالدماء أكثر جلالاً ومهابةً من ألف ملك على ألف عرش في ألف مملكة... بل أنت بين النزع والموت أشد هولاً وبطشاً من ألف قائدٍ في ألف جيش في ألف معركة.

أنت بكآبتك أشد فرحاً من الربيع بأزهاره... أنت بأوجاعك أهدأ بالاً من الملائكة بسمائها... وأنت بين الجلادين أكثر حرية من نور الشمس...

إن إكليل الشوك على رأسك هو أجل وأجمل من تاج بهرام... و المسمار في كفك أسمى وأفخم من صولجان المشتري... وقطرات الدماء على قدميك أسنى لمعاناً من قلائد عشتروت...

فسامح هؤلاء الضعفاء الذين ينوحون عليك لأنهم لا يدرون كيف ينوحون على نفوسهم، واغفر لهم لأنهم لا يعلمون أنك صرعت الموت بالموت ووهبت الحياة لمن في القبور.

جبران خليل جبران

العواصف

Christmas Turns the World Upside Down By Peter Wehner - NYT -

A Nativity painting from the late 15th or early 16th century.

Christmas Turns the World Upside Down

By Peter Wehner Dec. 24, 2019

"What does it mean for God’s power to be “made perfect in weakness”?"

If you were wholly unfamiliar with the life of Jesus and listened only to what many Christians in America say today, you could be forgiven for thinking that the most important thing Christianity values is worldly power — the power to control and compel, to impose one’s will on others, to vanquish one’s enemies. Blessed are the politically powerful and the well connected, you might assume, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The birth and life of Jesus shatter this narrative. Those of us of the Christian faith believe that Christmas Day represents the moment of God’s incarnation, when this broken world became his home. But it was not an entrance characterized by privilege, comfort, public celebration or self-glorification; it was marked instead by lowliness, obscurity, humility, fragility.

The circumstances of Jesus’ birth “were calculated to establish his detachment from power and authority in human terms,” wrote Malcolm Muggeridge, a 20th-century British journalist who converted late in life to Christianity.

That could be said not just about Jesus’ birth but also his entire life, which was in many respects an inversion of what the world, including much of the Christian world, prizes.


“Christ was born in a manger to a family for whom there was no room,” Craig Barnes, the president of Princeton Theological Seminary, told me. “He was raised by unremarkable parents in an unremarkable part of the world, conducted a ministry that was missed by most people, died as a criminal on a cross, and his ascension was seen only by a small band of disciples who then led a movement that within three centuries changed the world.”

The paradox is that Christianity changed the world despite Jesus’ declaration that his kingdom was not of this world. His disciples did not have notable worldly status or influence. Jesus’ energies and affections were primarily aimed toward social outcasts, the downtrodden and “unclean,” strangers and aliens, prostitutes and the powerless. The people Jesus clashed with and who eventually crucified him were religious authorities and those who wielded political power. The humble will be exalted, Jesus said, and the last shall be first. True greatness is shown through serving others and sacrifice.

All of this calls to mind an account in II Corinthians, one I have been intrigued by for nearly as long as I have been a Christian. In his epistle, Paul is describing a “thorn in my flesh” that was tormenting him. (We don’t know specifically what it was.) Three times he beseeched the Lord to remove it, according to the apostle, to which Jesus replied, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul went on to add, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

What does it mean for God’s power to be made perfect in weakness?

It’s a statement as much about us as it is about God. Most of us know that we often grow in times of weakness rather than strength, when we face hardship rather than experience success. That isn’t always the case; sometimes hardships and suffering simply overwhelm us and no good thing comes from them.

Everyone has a breaking point.

But it’s also true that weakness can open the way for greater personal growth, reflection and self-reflection, and focus us on what is essential rather than ephemeral. Last week, a friend who is a counselor told me of a former colleague of his who, because of chronic pain, was bedridden for two years. That pain she’s now largely free of. He described his former colleague as one the most cheerful and loving people he’s ever met. “She’s a better person” for having gone through her ordeal, he said. The point my friend was making isn’t that suffering is good but that sometimes it can serve a purpose. This is true for people of different faiths and people of no faith.


But from a Christian standpoint, Craig Barnes told me, “Our weakness finally opens our eyes to the need for a Savior. Nothing prevents that more than our strength. No one has ever said, ‘I was so successful I just had to come to Jesus.’”

“We can only love when we are softened,” according to Peggy Wehmeyer, a former religion correspondent for ABC. “We are most likely to be softened when we are weakened.” Ms. Wehmeyer, who wrote movingly about her husband’s suicide in these pages, told me that the aftermath of his death was “the most powerless I’ve ever felt. Trusting in God’s goodness and yielding without being able to nail him down. That’s where peace begins: Surrender, in powerlessness.”

It’s important to point out here that there are sufferings we may experience that make us a more resilient, deeper and more compassionate person, yet if we were asked whether we are glad for having gone through it, we would answer no.

James Forsyth, senior pastor of McLean Presbyterian Church in Virginia, which I attend with my family, was sexually abused as a teenager. “I wish this thing hadn’t have happened to me,” he says. But, he adds, “You can have scars and still be healed. There are some things in life you never move on from, but you do learn to carry them differently.”

Whatever their full effects, human weakness and suffering are not meant to be ends in themselves. For Christians, they are meant to spur us to seek out God from a place of need and provide an opportunity for the display of divine power. And again: Power understood through the prism of Christianity is different from how the world generally understands power. Kerry Dearborn, professor emerita at Seattle Pacific University, described to me the difference between power over others and the power of connecting with others, which she said requires that there be openness and vulnerability.

As I understand the words of Jesus as recorded in II Corinthians, weakness opens us up to a fundamentally new definition of strength — strength that is not coercive, domineering, prideful and self-seeking but rather compassionate, sacrificial, humble and empathetic. God’s power, perfected through our weakness, makes us instruments of mercy, seekers of justice, agents of reconciliation. It helps us see the world in a different way.

Renée Notkin, a pastor at Union Church in Seattle, told me: “I am daily inspired by how Jesus continually turns the world upside down in regards to power, might, world success and achievement. Jesus’ subversive challenges to the human-crafted structures that oppress and bind is what keeps me following Jesus and holding on to hope that there is a third way — the Jesus way that brings healing to individuals, communities and nations.”


The pastor, with whom I attended high school and college, added, “Jesus was most frequently out among the people — engaging and paying attention to the realities of ordinary people’s lives and helping them see that in God’s eyes they are extraordinary — and so often these are the people who are viewed as weak in the world. I am learning how to live well from those who hold very little worldly power but who are some of the most content and real people I’ve ever met.”

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,” Jesus declared in his most famous sermon. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

This type of power, often arrived at having traveled through what the Psalmist called “the valley of the shadow of death,” wasn’t simply Jesus spouting off abstract teachings; it was his life story. What the incarnation represents is God entering history not as the screenwriter of the drama but as an actor within it. Jesus is the suffering protagonist.

No one thought it would start quite this way, an infant placed in a manger in a troubled corner of a troubled world. You would have thought he would be among the most inconsequential individuals ever.

You would have been wrong.

The Smile -William Blake-

The Smile

-William Blake-

There is a Smile of Love 

And there is a Smile of Deceit 

And there is a Smile of Smiles 

In which these two Smiles meet 

And there is a Frown of Hate 

And there is a Frown of disdain 

And there is a Frown of Frowns 

Which you strive to forget in vain 

For it sticks in the Hearts deep Core 

And it sticks in the deep Back bone 

And no Smile that ever was smild 

But only one Smile alone 

That betwixt the Cradle & Grave 

It only once Smild can be 

But when it once is Smild 

Theres an end to all Misery .....

Dust in the wind - Sarah Brightman -

Dust in the wind 

- Sarah Brightman -

I close my eyes, only for a moment, and the moment's gone

All my dreams pass before my eyes, a curiosity

Dust in the wind

All they are is dust in the wind

Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea

All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see

Dust in the wind

All we are is dust in the wind

Oh, ho, ho

Now, don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky

It slips away

And all your money won't another minute buy

Dust in the wind

All we are is dust in the wind

All we are is dust in the wind

Dust in the wind

Everything is dust in the wind

Everything is dust in the wind

The wind

Songwriters: Kerry Livgren / Kerry A Livgren

Where Everything Is Music - Rumi -

Rose sleeves - Gibran -

Where Everything Is Music

by Jelaluddin Rumi

Don’t worry about saving these songs!

And if one of our instruments breaks,

it doesn’t matter.

We have fallen into the place

where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes

rise into the atmosphere,

and even if the whole world’s harp

should burn up, there will still be

hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.

We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is sea foam.

The graceful movements come from a pearl

somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge

of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive

from a slow and powerful root

that we can’t see.

Stop the words now.

Open the window in the center of your chest,

and let the spirit fly in and out. 

from Rumi – Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)

Translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne

Said a Blade of Grass - Kahlil Gibran -

Said a Blade of Grass

- Kahlil Gibran -

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.”

Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”

Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again—and she was a blade of grass.

And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such noise! They scatter all my winter dreams.”

The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you - Rumi -

The Breezes at Dawn 

 - Rumi -

“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you

Don't go back to sleep!

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep!

People are going back and forth 

across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,

The door is round and open

Don't go back to sleep!”

You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.- Toni Morrison -

The Work You Do, the Person You Are

 - Toni Morrison -

"Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”

That was what he said. This was what I heard:

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.

2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

Christmas Season :)

The Grave Digger - Gibran Khalil Gibran -

 "Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,That we may record our emptiness."
- GKG -

The Grave Digger 

- Kahlil Gibran -

Once, as I was burying one of my dead selves, 

the grave-digger came by and said to me, 

“Of all those who come here to bury, you alone I like.” 

Said I, “You please me exceedingly, but why do you like me?” 

“Because,” said he, 

“They come weeping and go weeping--

you only come laughing and go laughing.”

L’amour est cerise -Aragon-

L’amour est cerise

-Aragon-

L’amour est cerise

Rebelle et soumise

Paupières baissées

Quitte ta chemise

Belle fiancée

L'amour est cerise

Et le temps pressé

C'est partie remise

Pour aller danser 

Autant qu'il nous semble

Raisonnable et fou

Nous irons ensemble

Au-delà de tout

Prête-moi ta bouche

Pour t'aimer un peu

Ouvre-moi ta couche

Pour l'amour de Dieu 

Laisse-moi sans crainte

Venir à genoux

Goûter ton absinthe

Boire ton vin doux

Ô rires et plaintes

Ô mots insensés

La folle complainte

S'est vite élancée 

Défions le monde

Et ses interdits

Ton plaisir inonde

Ma bouche ravie

Vertu ou licence

Pardieu je m'en fous

Je perds ma semence

Dans ton sexe roux 

Ô Pierrot de lune

Ô monts et merveilles

Voilà que ma plume

Tombe de sommeil

Et comme une louve

Aux enfants frileux

La nuit nous recouvre

De son manteau bleu 

Rebelle et soumise

Paupières lassées

Remets ta chemise

Belle fiancée

L'amour est cerise

Et le temps passé

C'est partie remise

Pour aller danser

A Real Science of Mind - Tyler Burge & Out of Our Brains - ANDY CLARK - NYT The Stone

A Real Science of Mind 
- Tyler Burge -

DEC. 19, 2010, 5:18 PM

In recent years popular science writing has bombarded us with titillating reports of discoveries of the brain’s psychological prowess. Such reports invade even introductory patter in biology and psychology. We are told that the brain — or some area of it sees, decides, reasons, knows, emotes, is altruistic/egotistical, or wants to make love. For example, a recent article reports a researcher’s “looking at love, quite literally, with the aid of an MRI machine.” One wonders whether lovemaking is to occur between two brains, or between a brain and a human being.

There are three things wrong with this talk.

First, it provides little insight into psychological phenomena. Often the discoveries amount to finding stronger activation in some area of the brain when a psychological phenomenon occurs. As if it is news that the brain is not dormant during psychological activity! The reported neuroscience is often descriptive rather than explanatory. Experiments have shown that neurobabble produces the illusion of understanding. But little of it is sufficiently detailed to aid, much less provide, psychological explanation.

The idea that the neural can replace the psychological is the same idea that led to thinking that all psychological ills can be cured with drugs.

Second, brains-in-love talk conflates levels of explanation. Neurobabble piques interest in science, but obscures how science works. Individuals see, know, and want to make love. Brains don’t. Those things are psychological — not, in any evident way, neural. Brain activity is necessary for psychological phenomena, but its relation to them is complex.

Imagine that reports of the mid-20th-century breakthroughs in biology had focused entirely on quantum mechanical interactions among elementary particles. Imagine that the reports neglected to discuss the structure or functions of DNA. Inheritance would not have been understood. The level of explanation would have been wrong. Quantum mechanics lacks a notion of function, and its relation to biology is too complex to replace biological understanding. To understand biology, one must think in biological terms.

Discussing psychology in neural terms makes a similar mistake. Explanations of neural phenomena are not themselves explanations of psychological phenomena. Some expect the neural level to replace the psychological level. This expectation is as naive as expecting a single cure for cancer. Science is almost never so simple. See John Cleese’s apt spoof of such reductionism.

The third thing wrong with neurobabble is that it has pernicious feedback effects on science itself. Too much immature science has received massive funding, on the assumption that it illuminates psychology. The idea that the neural can replace the psychological is the same idea that led to thinking that all psychological ills can be cured with drugs.

Perceptual psychology, not neuroscience, should be grabbing headlines.

Correlations between localized neural activity and specific psychological phenomena are important facts. But they merely set the stage for explanation. Being purely descriptive, they explain nothing. Some correlations do aid psychological explanation. For example, identifying neural events underlying vision constrains explanations of timing in psychological processes and has helped predict psychological effects. We will understand both the correlations and the psychology, however, only through psychological explanation.

Scientific explanation is our best guide to understanding the world. By reflecting on it, we learn better what we understand about the world.

Neurobabble’s popularity stems partly from the view that psychology’s explanations are immature compared to neuroscience. Some psychology is indeed still far from rigorous. But neurobabble misses an important fact.

A powerful, distinctively psychological science matured over the last four decades. Perceptual psychology, pre-eminently vision science, should be grabbing headlines. This science is more advanced than many biological sciences, including much neuroscience. It is the first science to explain psychological processes with mathematical rigor in distinctively psychological terms. (Generative linguistics — another relatively mature psychological science — explains psychological structures better than psychological processes.)

What are distinctively psychological terms? Psychology is distinctive in being a science of representation. The term “representation” has a generic use and a more specific use that is distinctively psychological. I start with the generic use, and will return to the distinctively psychological use. States of an organism generically represent features of the environment if they function to correlate with them. A plant or bacterium generically represents the direction of light. States involved in growth or movement functionally correlate with light’s direction.

Task-focused explanations in biology and psychology often use “represent” generically, and proceed as follows. They identify a natural task for an organism. They then measure environmental properties relevant to the task, and constraints imposed by the organism’s bio-physical make-up. Next, they determine mathematically optimal performance of the task, given the environmental properties and the organism’s constraints. Finally, they develop hypotheses and test the organism’s fulfillment of the task against optimal performance.

This approach identifies systematic correlations between organisms’ states and environmental properties. Such correlations constitute generic representation. However, task-focused explanations that use “representation” generically are not distinctively psychological. For they apply to states of plants, bacteria, and water pumps, as well as to perception and thought.

Explanation in perceptual psychology is a sub-type of task-focused explanation. What makes it distinctively psychological is that it uses notions like representational accuracy, a specific type of correlation.

The difference between functional correlation and representational accuracy is signaled by the fact that scientific explanations of light-sensitivity in plants or bacteria invoke functional correlation, but not states capable of accuracy. Talk of accuracy would be a rhetorical afterthought. States capable of accuracy are what vision science is fundamentally about.

Science of mind is one of the most important intellectual developments in the last half century. It should not be obscured by neurobabble.

Why are explanations in terms of representational accuracy needed? They explain perceptual constancies. Perceptual constancies are capacities to perceive a given environmental property under many types of stimulation. You and a bird can see a stone as the same size from 6 inches or 60 yards away, even though the size of the stone’s effect on the retina differs. You and a bee can see a surface as yellow bathed in white or red light, even though the distribution of wavelengths hitting the eye differ.

Plants and bacteria (and water-pumps) lack perceptual constancies. Responses to light by plants and bacteria are explained by reference to states determined by properties of the light stimulus — frequency, intensity, polarization — and by how and where light stimulates their surfaces.

Visual perception is getting the environment right — seeing it, representing it accurately. Standard explanations of neural patterns cannot explain vision because such explanations do not relate vision, or even neural patterns, to the environment. Task-focused explanations in terms of functional correlation do relate organisms’ states to the environment. But they remain too generic to explain visual perception.

Perceptual psychology explains how perceptual states that represent environmental properties are formed. It identifies psychological patterns that are learned, or coded into the perceptual system through eons of interaction with the environment. And it explains how stimulations cause individuals’ perceptual states via those patterns. Perceptions and illusions of depth, movement, size, shape, color, sound localization, and so on, are explained with mathematical rigor.

Perceptual psychology uses two powerful types of explanation — one, geometrical and traditional; the other, statistical and cutting-edge.

Here is a geometrical explanation of distance perception. Two angles and the length of one side determine a triangle. A point in the environment forms a triangle with the two eyes. The distance between the eyes in many animals is constant. Suppose that distance to be innately coded in the visual system. Suppose that the system has information about the angles at which the two eyes are pointing, relative to the line between the eyes. Then the distance to the point in the environment is computable. Descartes postulated this explanation in 1637. There is now rich empirical evidence to indicate that this procedure, called “convergence,” figures in perception of distance. Convergence is one of over 15 ways human vision is known to represent distance or depth.

Here is a statistical explanation of contour grouping. Contour grouping is representing which contours (including boundary contours) “go together,” for example, as belonging to the same object. Contour grouping is a step toward perception of object shape. Grouping boundary contours that belong to the same object is complicated by this fact: Objects commonly occlude other objects, obscuring boundary contours of partially occluded objects. Grouping boundaries on opposite sides of an occluder is a step towards perceiving object shape.

To determine how boundary contours should ideally be grouped, numerous digital photographs of natural scenes are collected. Hundreds of thousands of contours are extracted from the photographic images. Each pair is classified as to whether or not it corresponds to boundaries of the same object. The distances and relative orientations between paired image-contours are recorded. Given enough samples, the probability that two photographic image-contours correspond to contours on the same object can be calculated. Probabilities vary depending on distance — and orientation relations among the image-contours. So whether two image-contours correspond to boundaries of the same object depends statistically on properties of image-contours.

Human visual systems are known to record contour information. In experiments, humans are shown only image-contours in photographs, not full photographs. Their performance in judging which contours belong to the same object, given only the image-contours, closely matches the objective probabilities established from the photographs. Such tests support hypotheses about how perceptions of object shape are formed from cues regarding contour groupings.

Representation, in the specific sense, and consciousness are the two primary properties that are distinctive of psychological phenomena. Consciousness is the what-it-is-like of experience. Representation is the being-about-something in perception and thought. Consciousness is introspectively more salient. Representation is scientifically better understood.

Where does mind begin? One beginning is the emergence of representational accuracy — in arthropods. (We do not know where consciousness begins.) Rigorous science of mind begins with perception, the first distinctively psychological representation. Maturation of a science of mind is one of the most important intellectual developments in the last half century. Its momentousness should not be obscured by neurobabble that baits with psychology, but switches to brain science. Brain and psychological sciences are working toward one another. Understanding their relation depends on understanding psychology. We have a rigorous perceptual psychology. It may provide a model for further psychological explanation that will do more than display an MRI and say, “behold, love.”

Additional Reading:

Charless C. Fowlkes, David R. Martin, and Jitendra Malik, “Local Figure-Ground Cues are Valid for Natural Images,” Journal of Vision 7 (2007), 1-9.

W.S. Geisler, “Visual Perception and the Statistical Properties of Natural Scenes,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008), 10.1-10.26.

David Knill, “Discriminating Planar Surface Slant from Texture: Human and Ideal Observers Compared,” Vision Research, 38 (1998), 1683-1711.

Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).

D. Vishwanath, A.R. Girshick, and M.S. Banks, “Why Pictures Look Right When Viewed from the Wrong Place,” Nature Neuroscience (2005), 1401-1410.

D.S. Weisberg, F.C. Keil, J. Goodstein, E. Rawson, and J.R. Gray, “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20 (2008), 470-477.


Tyler Burge is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at U.C.L.A. He is the author of many papers on philosophy of mind and three books with Oxford University Press: “Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on Frege,” “Foundations of Mind,” and most recently, “Origins of Objectivity, which discusses the origins of mind in perception and the success of perceptual psychology as a science.

*************************************
*****

Out of Our Brains 
- ANDY CLARK -

DECEMBER 12, 2010, 3:47 PM



Where is my mind?

The question — memorably posed by rock band the Pixies in their 1988 song — is one that, perhaps surprisingly, divides many of us working in the areas of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Look at the science columns of your daily newspapers and you could be forgiven for thinking that there is no case to answer. We are all familiar with the colorful “brain blob” pictures that show just where activity (indirectly measured by blood oxygenation level) is concentrated as we attempt to solve different kinds of puzzles: blobs here for thinking of nouns, there for thinking of verbs, over there for solving ethical puzzles of a certain class, and so on, ad blobum. (In fact, the brain blob picture has seemingly been raised to the status of visual art form of late with the publication of a book of high-octane brain images. )

There is no limit, it seems, to the different tasks that elicit subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, different patterns of neural activation. Surely then, all the thinking must be going on in the brain? That, after all, is where the lights are.

As our technologies become better adapted to fit the niche provided by the biological brain, they become more like cognitive prosthetics.

But then again, maybe not. We’ve all heard the story of the drunk searching for his dropped keys under the lone streetlamp at night. When asked why he is looking there, when they could surely be anywhere on the street, he replies, “Because that’s where the light is.” Could it be the same with the blobs?

Is it possible that, sometimes at least, some of the activity that enables us to be the thinking, knowing, agents that we are occurs outside the brain?

The idea sounds outlandish at first. So let’s take a familiar kind of case as a first illustration. Most of us gesture (some of us more wildly than others) when we talk. For many years, it was assumed that this bodily action served at best some expressive purpose, perhaps one of emphasis or illustration. Psychologists and linguists such as Susan Goldin-Meadow and David McNeill have lately questioned this assumption, suspecting that the bodily motions may themselves be playing some kind of active role in our thought process. In experiments where the active use of gesture is inhibited, subjects show decreased performance on various kinds of mental tasks. Now whatever is going on in these cases, the brain is obviously deeply implicated! No one thinks that the physical handwavings are all by themselves the repositories of thoughts or reasoning. But it may be that they are contributing to the thinking and reasoning, perhaps by lessening or otherwise altering the tasks that the brain must perform, and thus helping us to move our own thinking along.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times“Brain Cloud (2010)” on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of a show by John Baldessari.

It is noteworthy, for example, that the use of spontaneous gesture increases when we are actively thinking a problem through, rather than simply rehearsing a known solution. There may be more to so-called “handwaving” than meets the eye.

This kind of idea is currently being explored by a wave of scientists and philosophers working in the areas known as “embodied cognition” and “the extended mind.” Uniting these fields is the thought that evolution and learning don’t give a jot what resources are used to solve a problem. There is no more reason, from the perspective of evolution or learning, to favor the use of a brain-only cognitive strategy than there is to favor the use of canny (but messy, complex, hard-to-understand) combinations of brain, body and world. Brains play a major role, of course. They are the locus of great plasticity and processing power, and will be the key to almost any form of cognitive success. But spare a thought for the many resources whose task-related bursts of activity take place elsewhere, not just in the physical motions of our hands and arms while reasoning, or in the muscles of the dancer or the sports star, but even outside the biological body — in the iPhones, BlackBerrys, laptops and organizers which transform and extend the reach of bare biological processing in so many ways. These blobs of less-celebrated activity may sometimes be best seen, myself and others have argued, as bio-external elements in an extended cognitive process: one that now criss-crosses the conventional boundaries of skin and skull.

One way to see this is to ask yourself how you would categorize the same work were it found to occur “in the head” as part of the neural processing of, say, an alien species. If you’d then have no hesitation in counting the activity as genuine (though non-conscious) cognitive activity, then perhaps it is only some kind of bio-envelope prejudice that stops you counting the same work, when reliably performed outside the head, as a genuine element in your own mental processing?

Another way to approach the idea is by comparison with the use of prosthetic limbs. After a while, a good prosthetic limb functions not as a mere tool but as a non-biological bodily part. Increasingly, the form and structure of such limbs is geared to specific functions (consider the carbon-fiber running blades of the Olympic and Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius) and does not replicate the full form and structure of the original biological template. As our information-processing technologies improve and become better and better adapted to fit the niche provided by the biological brain, they become more like cognitive prosthetics: non-biological circuits that come to function as parts of the material underpinnings of minds like ours.

Many people I speak to are perfectly happy with the idea that an implanted piece of non-biological equipment, interfaced to the brain by some kind of directly wired connection, would count (assuming all went well) as providing material support for some of their own cognitive processing. Just as we embrace cochlear implants as genuine but non-biological elements in a sensory circuit, so we might embrace “silicon neurons” performing complex operations as elements in some future form of cognitive repair. But when the emphasis shifts from repair to extension, and from implants with wired interfacing to “explants” with wire-free communication, intuitions sometimes shift. That shift, I want to argue, is unjustified. If we can repair a cognitive function by the use of non-biological circuitry, then we can extend and alter cognitive functions that way too. And if a wired interface is acceptable, then, at least in principle, a wire-free interface (such as links your brain to your notepad, BlackBerry or iPhone) must be acceptable too. What counts is the flow and alteration of information, not the medium through which it moves.

When information flows, some of the most important unities may emerge in regimes that weave together activity in brain, body and world.

Perhaps we are moved simply by the thought that these devices (like prosthetic limbs) are detachable from the rest of the person? Ibn Sina Avicenna, a Persian philosopher-scientist who lived between 980 and 1037 A.D, wrote in the seventh volume of his epic “De Anima (Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus)” that “These bodily members are, as it were, no more than garments; which, because they have been attached to us for a long time, we think are us, or parts of us [and] the cause of this is the long period of adherence: we are accustomed to remove clothes and to throw them down, which we are entirely unaccustomed to do with our bodily members” (translation by R. Martin). Much the same is true, I want to say, of our own cognitive circuitry.

The fact that there is a stable biological core that we do not “remove and throw down” blinds us to the fact that minds, like bodies, are collections of parts whose deepest unity consists not in contingent matters of undetachability but in the way they (the parts) function together as effective wholes. When information flows, some of the most important unities may emerge in integrated processing regimes that weave together activity in brain, body, and world.

Such an idea is not new. Versions can be found in the work of James, Heidegger, Bateson, Merleau-Ponty, Dennett, and many others. But we seem to be entering an age in which cognitive prosthetics (which have always been around in one form or another) are displaying a kind of Cambrian explosion of new and potent forms. As the forms proliferate, and some become more entrenched, we might do well to pause and reflect on their nature and status. At the very least, minds like ours are the products not of neural processing alone but of the complex and iterated interplay between brains, bodies, and the many designer environments in which we increasingly live and work.

Please don’t get me wrong. Some of my best friends are neuroscientists and neuro-imagers (as it happens, my partner is a neuro-imager, so brain blobs are part of our daily diet). The brain is a fantastic beast, more than worthy of the massive investments we make to study it. But we — the human beings with versatile bodies living in a complex, increasingly technologized, and heavily self-structured, world — are more fantastic still. Really understanding the mind, if the theorists of embodied and extended cognition are right, will require a lot more than just understanding the brain. Or as the Pixies put it:

Where is my mind?


Way out in the water, see it swimming

[Andy Clark's response to the comments on this post can be found here: "Extended Mind Redux: A Response."]

Andy Clark is professor of logic and metaphysics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences at Edinburgh University, Scotland. He is the author of “Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again” (MIT Press, 1997) and “Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension” (Oxford University Press, 2008).