Book Review & Pointers: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield | Neha's Notebook

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Everyone is an artist. Everyone has some or the other form of art to create, craft and contribute to the burgeoning functioning of the universe.

But most of us are artists in disguise waiting for the glasshouses of our minds to crack open so that we can perceive fresh possibilities out of the things we sense and interpret.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is a book on creativity, on writing, on what prevents and blocks us to express our true self, and how to take a leap by understanding what blocks us.

Different people call this block by different names. In this book, the author calls this blocking element by the name of ‘Resistance’.

The book is divided into three main parts. Part one deals with knowing the characteristics and tendencies of resistance. Part two deals with ways of combating resistance and part three deals with what lies beyond resistance.

In this review, I share useful and functionl pointers from the book. So, let’s begin with these.

A Secret That real writers know
There is a secret that real writers know and wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is resistance.

The Unlived Life
Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life. Between the two lives stands resistance.

What is Resistance?
Every sun casts a shadow and a genius’ shadow is resistance.. Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet.

CHARACTERISTICS OF Resistance
#1 Resistance is invisible
#2 Resistance is internal
#3 Resistance is insidious and always lying
#4 Resistance is implacable, means that it cannot be reasoned with. It understands nothing but power. It is an engine of destruction, programmed from the factory with one object only, to prevent us from doing our work.
#5 Resistance is impersonal. Resistance is not out to get you personally. Resistance is a force of nature and it acts objectively.
#6 Resistance is infallible, which means that it will unfailingly point to the calling or action it most wants us to stop doing. The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more resistance we’ll feel towards pursuing it.
#7 Resistance is universal. Everyone who has a body experiences resistance.
#8 Resistance never sleeps. The battle must be fought anew every day.
#9 Resistance is fueled by fear. Fear is an indicator of resistance. It has no strength of its own. If a calling meant nothing to us, we’d never feel resistance towards it. When we master th fear, we conquer resistance.
#10 Resistance opposes and obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to the higher.
#11 Resistance is most powerful at the finish line.
#12 Resistance recruits allies – When the writer begins to overcome resistance, when she actually starts to write, she may find that those close to her began acting strange. They may become moody or sullen, they may get sick; they may accuse the awakening writer of changing of not being the person she was.
#13 Procrastination is the most common manifestation of resistance.
#14 Resistance leads to self-dramatization and victimhood.
#15 Resistance feels like unhappiness
#16 If you find yourself criticizing other people you are probably doing it out of resistance. Individuals who are realized in their own lives never criticize others.
#17 Resistance can take the form of self-doubt, because self-doubt is an indicator of aspiration.
#18 Sometimes we experience resistance because we are afraid of being isolated or alone.
#19 Resistance can take the form of seeking healing. But the part of us who thinks that we need to heal before we can pursue our true calling is not the part from where need to create. It stems from a lower sphere of the self. In reality the more trouble we have got, the better and richer our work becomes.
#20 Resistance can show up as Rationlization. Our minds can lie and make us believe in the seemingly rational justifications of why we shouldn’t do our work.
#21 Resistance can be beaten. It is like giving birth to ourselves.
#22 Resistance is a bullying critter that keeps coming.

Ways of Combating Resistance
#1 The term of our life can be divided into two parts – before turning pro and after. Amateurs believe in resistance. Professional does not. A pro shows up every day, show up no matter what, stay on the job all day, committed over the long haul, do not overidentify with their jobs, master the technique of their jobs, accept praise or blame for their jobs and have a sense of humor about their jobs.
#2 The more you love your art/calling/enterprise, the more important its accomplishment is to the evolution of your soul, the more you’ll fear it, and the more resistance you will experience facing it.
#3 Patience – Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. The professional is patient and understands delayed gratification. The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each ndividual work.
#4 A pro views her work as craft not art. She knows if she thinks about it too much, it will paralyze her, so she focusees on the technique. A professional dedicates himself to mastering technique
#5 A professional accepts no excuses. A professional knows that resistance is like a telemarketer, if you say hello, you’re finished.
#6 The professional conducts his business in the real world. Adversity, injustice, bad hops, rotten calls, even good breaks and lucky bounces, all comprise the ground over which the campaign must be waged. The field is heaven, the professional understands, only in heaven.
#7 A professional is prepared each day to confront his own self-sabotage. He understands that the field alters every day. His goal is not victory but to handle himself, his insides, as sturdily and steadily as he can.
#8 A professional distances herself from her instrument – her person, her body, her voice, her talent; the physical, mental, emotional and psychological being she uses in her work. She doesn’t identify with her instrument. It is simply what God gave her and what she has to work with.
#9 A professional doesn’t take failure or success personally. A professional schools herself to stand apart from her performance, even as she gives herself to it heart and soul.
#10 The professional self-validates. A professional cannot allow the actions of others to determine his reality.
#11 A professional endures adversity by keeping his eye on the doughnut and not the hole.
#12 A professional recognizes his limitations and brings in other pros and respects them.
#13 A professional reinvents himself
#14 A professional takes herself as a corporation. She can hire herself and fire herself. This reinforces he idea of professionalism because it separates the artist-doing-the-work to the will-and-consciousness-running the show. Besides, it gives her a healthy distance from herself. She’s less subjective and doesn’t take blows personally.
#15 There is no mystery in turning pro. It is a decision brought about by the act of will. We make up our minds to view ourselves as pros and we do it. Simple as that.

Nature of the Higher Realm, Beyond Resistance
#1 As resistance keeps us from who we were born to be, equal and opposite powers are poised against it. These are our allies and angels. Angels are the agents of evolution. The Kabbalah describes them as bundles of light, meaning intelligence, consciousness.
#2 When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron fillings. Ideas and insights come to us.
#3 The Muse is the daughter of Zeus,, the father of the gods, and Memory Mnemosyne. Before I sit down to work, I’ll take a minute and show respect to this unseen power who can make or break me.
#4 The Magic of Making a Start – the moment one commits oneself, the providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events raising in one’s favour and material assistance would come his way.
#5 Without our exerting effort or even thinking about it, some voice in our head pipes up to counsel us on how to do our work and live our lives. Whose voice is it? What software is grinding away, scanning gigabytes, while we, our mainstream selves, are otherwise, occupied? What exactly it is doing? It’s organizing. The principle of organizing is built into nature. Chaos itself is self-organizing. Out of primordial disorder, stars find their orbits, rivers make their way to the sea.
#6 The Ego is the part of the psyche we think of as the “I”. Our conscious intelligence, our everyday brain that thinks, plans, and runs the show of our day-to-day life. The Self is a greater entity, which includes the Ego but also incorporates the Personal and Collective Unconscious. Dreams and intuitions come from the Self. The archetypes of unconscious dwell there. It is the sphere of the soul.
#7 Angels make their home in the Self, while Resistance has its seat in the Ego. The fight is between the two. The Ego is the part of psyche that believes in material existence. Ego believes that Death is real, time & space are real, every individual is separate from every other, the predominant impulse of life is self-preservation and there is no god. The Ego doesn’t like us to evolive. It likes the things just the way they are.


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Book Review: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

For once, picture a religious cult in your imagination. A cult that follows secret rites and rituals. Then picture a man joining the cult and masquerading as the member of the cult but only to infiltrate it and dig out its mystical secrets to become powerful.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown is a fiction novel depicting the story of a cult named as the Masons cult. Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology and Dan Brown’s signature protagonist character stumbles upon this cult quite all of a sudden.

Robert’s friend, Peter Soloman, is the head of the Masonic cult. One day Robert received a call from Peter’s assistant inviting him to give a lecture in an event going to be held in the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.

He also requested Robert to bring a package with him, a package which he entrusted to him many years earlier.

But as soon as Robert reached the venue, he came to know that the call was a hoax and the man posing as Peter’s assistant had lured him to find the secret Lost Word and the ancient pyramid owned & hidden by the Masonic cult, or else he would kill old Peter to death. This man named Mal’akh, tattoos carved throughout his entire body, had kidnapped Peter and was seeking to unfold the secrets of the cult in order to become more powerful. And so, he charged Robert for doing this work for him.

On the other side, led by the trail of clues Robert became more and more puzzled at every step.

When he reached the hall where he was asked to give his lecture, in place of an audience he found a hand displayed at the center of the hall. The hand had been severed from the body of his friend Peter by his kidnapper. The hand was tattooed with the symbols of the Hand of Mysteries.

Examining Soloman’s hand, along with the police officials, he discovered a clue which led them to a room in the building which was the masonic altar comprising several symbolic objects and a pyramid with inscriptions engraved on it. The pyramid’s capstone was missing.

The capstone was later discovered in the small package Robert had brought, when the police official named Sato examined his bag under the x-ray machine. Robert explained to her that he was unaware of the contents of the package. However, still, he was taken into custody by Sato. He was rescued by another man named Warren Bellamy who was the architect of the building. He too belonged to the Masons cult and was seeking Robert’s help in rescuing Peter from his kidnapper.

Meanwhile, the kidnapper man Mal’akh destroyed the Noetic Science laboratory of Peter’s sister Katherine by tricking and drowning her assistant in an animal pod of ethanol.

To save herself, Katherine united with Robert and Bellamy. Katherine and Robert reach Mal’akh’s house, where they were gagged and left to die in sensory deprivation tank and through needles respectively. Leaving both of them, Mal’akh fled away from the house with a weak Peter, arriving at the House of the Temple, where he threatened him to reveal the ancient secret to him.

Why was this man Mal’akh so vengeful towards Robert, Peter and the cult? Well, the answer lied in his history. Mal’akh actually was Soloman’s son Zachary. He was carrying wrath and revenge in his heart because many years ago he had been abandoned by his father in the jail as he had been spoiling his wealth in drugs and luxury.

By the time, his true identity became revealed, the police official Sato had reached Mal’akh’s house where she saved both Katherine and Robert. Thereupon, the entire crew moved towards the House of the Temple where one of their helicopters shatters the skylight of the temple, the shards of which killed Malakh to death.

In the end, Peter revealed that the Lost Word, the Word of God lay in the cornerstone of the monument where they were, buried in the ground beneath monument’s staircase.

He also told that the words inscribed in the base of the pyramid were Laus Deo meaning Praise God.

Masons had buried and hid the pyramid with the thought that when the time was right, the pyramid would be discovered and would usher a new era of enlightenment, which, apparently, had arrived, by means of Robert.

The novel mentions ideas of ‘mind over matter’, spirituality & enlightenment, ancient symbology & Noetic Science. Like other parts of this series, this book too is quite entertaining and immersive. I totally enjoyed reading it!

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Book Review: Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono | Neha's Notebook

Lateral Thinking by Bono Edward De

Can two plus two equal five?
Can water run uphill instead of downhill?
Is it possible to attach magnets to apples and then create a machine that can pluck the apples from the apple tree by attracting magnets?

In ordinary logic, things like these may appear weird or absurd. This typical way of thinking is called as the vertical thinking. But there is another way to think, an out-of-the-box way. It is termed as lateral thinking. Lateral thinking liberates an immense ocean of ideas and possibilities with regard to problem solving, developing new ideas and even day-to-day life.

Lateral thinking by Edward de Bono unfolds the way of lateral thinking in deep detail. The book elaborates on the ideas as in what is lateral thinking, what it does and how it is practiced?

The book delves deep into the concept of lateral thinking while elaborating its obvious relatedness to the functioning of the human mind. Every chapter is divided into definition section and a section of practice examples.

In this review, I share some of the insightful pointers from the book. Without further ado, let’s get started with these!

EDUCATION, CULTURE, CONFLICT & THE NEED FOR LATERAL THINKING
While the culture is concerned with estabilishing ideas, education is concerned with communicating these established ideas. Typically, the education is more concerned with collection of ideas but the true meaning of education is not merely collection of ideas but also the best ways of using it.

In most schools, the type of thinking promoted is vertical thinking or thinking based on total logic. Ideas are pitted against each other in conflict for change. Typical education works from outside.

Lateral thinking is more concerned with insight rearrangement from within. And to do this, we must understand how the human mind works.

THE MECHANISM & FUNCTIONING OF HUMAN MIND
Mind is an information handling machine just like a computer. The basic characteristics of the mind are:
• It is a Self-organizing, self-maximizing memory system
• It is a patterning system
o It create patterns, recognize patterns, react to patterns and makes use of patterns wherein the established patterns develop a code.
• It works in Code communication
o Code heading – trigger word – activation of pattern
o Can only work because mind has preset patterns
• Insight & humour
o switch over from one arrangement of information to the other
o if switch over is temporary, it results in humour
o if switch over is permanent, it results in insight
• It is a cumulative memory system
o Memory – a memory is anything that happens and does not completely unhappens. The result is some trace that is left. The trace may last for a long time or short time.
o Mind picks out information from the environment based on the preset patterns stored in it
• It is a memory surface
o The accumulated memory trace forms something called as a memory surface
o like contours of a landscape
o like a jelly plate on which hot water and cold water are poured and patterns form on the jelly as a result
o like rainfall forming little rivulets, rivers or streams of information
o The arrangement of information on the memory surface is called as a pattern
• Mind has limited attention span
o only part of the memory can be activated at a time
o which part is activated depends on what is being presented to the memory surface
o The most easily activated area is the most familiar one
o A familiar pattern becomes ever more familiar
o this way mind forms and stores a stock of preset patterns which are the basis for code communication
• Its content depends on the sequence of the arrival of information

WHAT IS LATERAL THINKING?
• Lateral thinking is liberation from old ideas and stimulation of new ideas
• insight restructuring for maximum use of stored information
• A means for restructuring and escaping cliché patterns for putting information together in new ways for generating new ideas
• Lateral thinking is concerned with changing patterns.
• Directly linked to the information handling system of the mind
• Used for generating new ideas, problem solving and processing perceptual choice
o perceptual choice is natural patterning behaviour of mind – it determines what goes in each package of information
• Not looking for right answers but generating alternatives for looking at new ways of the situation
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERTICAL THINKING & LATERAL THINKING
Lateral thinking and vertical thinking are complimentary. Here are a few differences between the two of them.
• Lateral thinking is generative. Vertical thinking is selective.
• Vertical thinking is used to dig a hole deeper whereas Lateral thinking is used to dig a hole in a different place.
• In vertical thinking, rightness matters. In lateral thinking, richness matters.
• Vertical thinking is concerned with selecting the best approach. Lateral thinking is concerned with generating as many approaches as possible just for the sake of generating them.
• Vertical thinking works with a direction. Lateral thinking works by generating directions.
• Vertical thinking is analytical. Lateral thinking is provocative.
• In vertical thinking, one moves from one step to the other, one step at a time. in lateral thinking, one doesn’t have to be sequential. One can jump from one point to the other.
• In vertical thinking, one uses negative to block certain pathways. In lateral thinking, there is no negative.
• In vertical thinking one throws out what is not relevant. In lateral thinking, one welcomes what is irrelevant to generate alternate ways of looking at a situation.
• Vertical thinking is a finite process where one works to arrive at an answer. Lateral thinking is a probabilistic process where there is no need for an answer.
TECHNIQUES, TOOLS & DEVICES FOR LATERAL THINKING
#1 Generation Of Alternatives
o the most basic principle of lateral thinking is that any particular way of looking at things is only one from among many possible ways – Lateral thinking is concerned with exploring these other ways by rearranging and restructuring information
o instead of blindly accepting the most obvious approach, one looks for the alternatives
o Practice generating alternatives with geometric figures, non-geometrical shapes, pictures, photographs from newspapers & magazines, altered pictures, written material such as stories, problems and inconveniences of everyday living
o Quota is the term used to describe number of alternative ideas generated in a given period of time
#2 Challenging assumptions
o instead of generating alternatives A, B, C, D, we examine the assumptions A, B, C, D.
#3 the why technique
o repetition of why at each step
o by refusing to be comforted with an explanation, one tries to look at things in a different way and to increase the possibility of restructuring a pattern
o ex: why is blackboard black?
because the chalk is white
why is chalk whute?
#4 innovation
o involves forward thinking and moving forward
o building up something new rather than analyzing something old
#5 suspended judgement
o the purpose of thinking is not to be right but to be effective
o Vertical thinking involves being right all along. Judgement is exercised at every step. One is not allowed to take a step that is not right. Vertical thinking is selection by exclusion – judgement is the method of exclusion and negative (no, not) is the tool of exclusion
o The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar in generating new ideas
o With lateral thinking one is allowed to be wrong all the way but one must be right at the end.
o Suspended judgement is a deliberate delay in judgement wherein one postpones it till the end instead of applying the judgement immediately.
#6 Design
o design is a convenient form of using lateral thinking principles
o visual expression of a complicated structure is much easier ththan verbal expression
o Create a new design, redesign something, organizational design
o Divide a design into individual units of functions
#7 Dominant ideas & crucial factor
o A dominant idea is the organizing theme, a way of looking at a situation
o One defines it in order to escape from it – why are we always looking at this thing in the same way
o Dominant idea is not in the situation but the way of looking at the situation
o Crucial factor is the element, the tethering point which must always be included no matter how one looks at the situation – what is keeping us to this old approach?
o The dominant idea organizes the information and the crucial factor tethers it.
#8 Fractionation
o In self-maximizing memory system of the mind, there is a tendency for patterns to become larger and larger.
o The more unified a pattern is, the more difficult it is to restructure it – so one divides a pattern into fractions and restructure the pattern by restructuring these individual fractions and then reassembling the rearranged fractions to generate a new pattern, a restructered pattern.
#9 Reversal Method
o Reverse how you look at something
o One takes things as they are and turns them round inside out, upside down, back to front.
o Ex: you can make water run uphill instead of downhill
o Ex: A policeman organizing traffic – reversal – a policeman disorganizing traffic – traffic organizing the policeman etc.
o No one is better than the rest – one is simply searching for provocative rearrangements of information
#10 Brainstorming
o a formal setting for use of lateral thinking
o main features
 cross stimulation – stimulating others’ ideas and receiving stimulation in return
 suspended judgement
 formality of the setting
 group activity
 Notetaking a permanent list of the many butterfly ideas generated in a brainstorming session
#11 Analogies
o A simple story or situation that is compared to something else
o making connection between the given situation and a similar situation
o An analogy has a life of its own
o Analogies are used to provide movement to the train of thoughts
#12 Choice of entry point & attention area
o Attention area is the part of the situation or problem that is attended to
o Entry point refers to the part of the problem or situation that is first attended to= first area of attention
o rotation of attention – divide a problem into fractions or features and rotate the attention from one area to the other
o Separation of units, selection of units, combination or reassembly of units
#13 Random Stimulation
o Instead of trying to work from within an idea, one uses external stimulation which acts on the idea from outside.
o Random exposure – to welcome a new situation and deal with it


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