John Lennon

If John Lennon were still alive he would've been 70 yesterday; he died in 1980 when he was 40 years old. I watched The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which seemed as good a way as any to celebrate his birth. The radio station played “Nowhere Man”, a song Lennon wrote about himself, and no review of his life would be complete without mentioning the song “Imagine”. Lennon believed in peaceful revolution and advocated for human rights, especially where he saw their abuse. It's all there in his song, here's the message, paraphrased: Imagine no religion, no countries, nothing to kill or die for; no possessions, greed or hunger. Imagine sharing all the world, living for today, in peace. I wonder what Lennon would've said had he lived? His song is probably the most widely recognized in the world, a dream countless people still aspire to.

But Lennon's life was not a fairy tale.  He didn't really know his parents.  He seems to have been very abusive of people close to him in his earlier years.  His affair with Yoko Ono (who herself faced hardship in early life) led to leaving his first wife and son, whose existence was kept secret to protect his career.  While with Ono she and John became burned out from drugs, quacks, emotional breakdowns and media attention.  His relationship with Ono was inconstant: she had relationships with gigolos, and at her suggestion he had an affair with their personal assistant May Pang for several years.  Mark Chapman, who shot him in 1980, was obsessed by Salinger's book The Catcher in the Rye.  Salinger himself was interested in a litany of spiritual, medical, and nutritional belief systems.  All told, it makes for a pretty messy story.  But out of all this there was produced moments of beauty, and many people found inspiration. 

omafiets

So you want a comfortable bike to take you around town nimbly balanced on two wheels?  Forget recumbents.  Omafiets, Dutch for "grandmother's bike" are the gold standard for comfort.  According to Mark Sanders, bicycle designer, a bolt upright riding posture is better than one leaning over to reach the handlebars.  Though not news to me, his accompanying photo was interesting because one of my big aspirations is to go on a cross country road trip by bike.  (And even if that never happens, I am still taking a lot of local bike trips.)  In his article Sanders was only considering upright bikes, but omafiets seem to come out on top even against recumbents.  The best recumbents I have ridden (and only recently does that statement carry any weight- see my report on Angletech) are the short wheel base "stick recumbents".  These bikes, like the Challenge Mistral or the Bacchetta Giro, are beautiful.  But while comfortable for short rides, exercising while in a very recumbent position can lead to minor numbness in one's feet, and to keep a relatively low seat height these bikes have 20 inch front wheels.  An omafiets has large 28 inch wheels that better smooth out irregularities in rough terrain.  But so can "crank forward" bikes, particularly those made by RANS.  However after reading about omafiets, RANS crank forward bikes seem to be a more expensive solution to a problem that doesn't exist, or if it does it is only because omafiets aren't widely enough known by or available to American riders.  Everything about omafiets are utilitarian, and they don't have more gears than you really need. 

I am about as far away from the Netherlands as one can get, so what are my options?  Probably the easiest thing I could do is try to assemble my own omafiets from different parts, beginning with the right size and shape of frame, handlebars, seat and wheels.  (According to some people, omafiets are similar to cruiser/comfort/leisure bikes, but there are often differences in frame geometry.)  I can also stay abreast of information from Velovision, prodigious bloggers like The Lazy Randonneur, and read Peter Eland's book "Practical Bike Buyer's Guide".  So will an omafiets make a good cross country bike?  I think so, they can easily be fitted with front and rear racks for carrying gear, so it looks like a good fit all around!  I wonder how many miles in the saddle I can log in one year?  BTW, if you look at other countries besides the Netherlands where bikes are a primary form of transportation you see the same general form.  For example, Japanese "mamachari" bikes are similar if not identical to many omafiets.

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If you want to delve any further into the minutiae of Dutch bikes, there are also "opafiets" (grandpa bikes), the picture above is a bike of this variety.  At the linked page is an image showing the shape of the handlebars, an important feature of any oma or opafiets.

La Mettrie

"L'homme machine" or "Man the Machine" was written in 1748 by Julien Offray de La Mettrie.  It is described as an important contribution to the development of the Age of Enlightenment, but leaving its historical context aside for the moment, it contains many interesting ideas which I will try to summarize.

La Mettrie, a physician, allows only the use of facts and observations derived through experimentation to describe the human body.  From this approach he concludes that it is a machine, though admittedly a very complex machine that is initially impossible to get a clear idea of, and therefore to define.  It is only the arrangement of our parts that distinguishes one person from another, or a person from an animal, plant, or anything else.  Observation leads La Mettrie to conclude that animals think, are intelligent, and feel repentance and shame just as humans.  A materialistic explanation can even be extended to illuminate the causes of criminal acts.  Indeed, all things have materialistic explanations for La Mettrie.  Our abilities as well as our limitations can be ascribed to our material organization; it is our ignorance of them that has led us to use alternative explanations (usually supernatural).  For La Mettrie, we exist simply to exist, but if there is a reason, then nature made us for pleasure first and to be happy, and secondarily to be educated (though he suggests that like Gould's classic article about the Spandrels of San Marco, our ability to learn may have only been accidental.)

There is one quote by La Mettrie that I cannot improve on by summarization, so I will include it's translation (full pdf paper):

There is nothing contradictory about
(1) being a machine and (2) being able to feel, to think and to tell right from wrong like telling blue from yellow; that is,
(1) being a mere animal and (2) being born with intelligence and a sure instinct for morality,
any more than there is about
•being an ape or a parrot and •being able to give oneself pleasure.
. . . .Who would ever have guessed in advance that a drop of liquid ejaculated in mating would give rise to such divine pleasure? or that there would be born from it a little creature who would be able one day, given certain laws, to enjoy the same delights? Thought incompatible with organised matter? That is so far from right, I believe, that thought seems to be a property of matter, like electricity, power to move, impenetrability, extension, etc. 

In case this translation isn't clear, to La Mattrie, thought is not incompatible with organized matter, rather it is a property of it! Even 262 years later, we haven't solved that riddle yet.  But imagine if we really acted as though we were aware that we are the purely physical machines he describes us as.  What if we understood that we and all other things differ only in minor differences of organization, without any substantial differences at all.  Small changes in organization can lead to large changes in appearance and behavior.  Wouldn't we then be more sympathetic to our fellow men and creatures?  La Mattrie certainly thought so:  

Those haughty, vain, self-praising beings who are marked off by their pride more than by the label ‘men’ —are basically only animals and upright-crawling machines....
If only men would always show [as animals] the same gratitude for kindness and the same respect for humanity! Then we wouldn’t have to fear being met with ingratitude, or to fear these wars that are the scourge of the human race and the real hangmen of the law of nature.

Angletech

While on vacation recently (a whole story in itself worth retelling) I visited one of the premiere recumbent dealers in the country, Angletech.  In a span of a two hours I test rode the best bikes available:

• Tour Easy (Fold Easy)
• Rans Stratus XP
• Rans Enduro Sport
• Rans F5
• Bacchetta Corsa
• Challenge Seiran
• Rans X-Stream
• Challenge Fujin

I also rode the ICE B2, a bike somewhere between the Rans Enduro Sport and F5 in seat/crank reclination.  The list is ordered from more upright to more laidback, which is the order in which I test rode the bikes, to find where my comfort zone really is.  In the end, I liked the Rans Enduro Sport the best, which is a popular design for short wheelbase recumbent bikes.  I was acutally surprised by this, as my limited recumbent riding led me to believe I was more of a Tour Easy guy.  But after riding these bikes in sequence two times, the Tour Easy felt way too upright, like I had very poor power transfer to the pedals.  After these recumbents, I rode the "Crank Forward" bikes:

• Rans Fusion
• Rans Dynamik
• Rans Alterra

The Rans Dynamik was the best feeling to me, very comfortable.  And last the tricycles:

• Terratrike Rover
• Terratrike Cruiser
• ICE Adventure 3fs
• ICE Sprint2
• Greenspeed X5
• ICE Vortex

I liked the ICE Sprint2 the best, it was low and had suspension.  But the connection to the ground was not as nice as with the bikes, so the Rans Enduro Sport was the overall favorite of all that I tested.  Who knows if a longer test period (weeks) would confirm these first impressions?  It would be great to do that!  And I would've loved to try the tandem recumbents, but after the lengthy test rides I had no willing participants.

All those were only a fraction of the bikes on the crowded display room floor, so the next day wondering if I'd missed a rare opportunity, I called back to see if Kelvin Clark, the owner, had any Cruzbikes like the Quest.  He said he didn't, and furthermore gave good reasons why he though that if I had tried one, I wouldn't have liked it over and above the Enduro Sport that I selected as my personal favorite.  Now as it was, I liked that bike for the sheer pleasure of the riding experience, but some people might value other characteristics at least as much, such as cargo capacity.  Needless to say, there were bikes there designed to meet that need admirably as well.  And finding one's personal “nirvana” on a bike is more than simply a factor of seat/crank height.  For example, Rans created the Enduro as a response to consumer requests to lower the seat height on their popular V-Rex bike.  The seat height felt right to me.

Bikes are vehicles, archetypal things that move us, but they require the attention of a navigator to steer a path. This isn't much different from life, where we must steer a path to avoid the shoals of disaster. Life is always in motion, and we are all going somewhere. It is obvious when riding a bike that one must be attentive to everything in the environment around them. Though it is less obvious, so too must one be attentive in life in order to get anywhere. This is one reason why I love riding a bike. I can really get around for very little energy, in fact I put more energy into paying attention to where I am going than I put into making the bike move!

(On the subject of how riding a bike increases one's attentiveness to the here and now, what about a sauna? Stepping into a very hot room, then stepping out into the cold bare naked makes one aware of the largest organ on their body – the skin.)

multilingualism

Humans are essentially the same the world over, so what are the barriers to understanding and empathizing with one another?  Physical appearance and cultural differences are one, and among the cultural differences a big one is the use of different languages.  Without a translator, dictionary, or translation program to refer to, if you don't know the language you are helpless.  The less foreign languages become a barrier, the more we will understand what makes the human experience unique for each of the six billion plus people on this planet, our only home.  Foreign languages and literature is an interesting field.  I can never know every one of us, but I should know more nonetheless.  I'd like to be fluent in all forms of communication basic to human society and familiar with the information [for which] they were created to represent.  Then I can call myself literate, a scholar, and an expert in any field I work in.  I must admit I don't read enough English literature as it is. 

attention

Life as it is, here and now, is as good as it gets.  When something catches my attention and I want to turn toward it, I also turn away from the rest of my life.  I have to be careful with my attention!  (Zen contains a corollary message.)  When I follow the necessity of transient circumstances, my life is best, and it flows more smoothly.  By allowing myself to be receptive to the changing needs of life I become more accepting, appreciative, and compassionate.  And my thoughts and actions reflect this attitude. 

It used to be that we could only satisfy our basic needs; an ascetic lifestyle was the norm for our early ancestors.  Then, when culture and technology rapidly changed our lifestyle, we learned how to satisfy almost any need we could imagine, faster than ever before.  But we lack the native wisdom to know which desires should be satisfied and which should not, which impulses to act on and which to restrain.  This wasn't a problem before, we simply couldn't satisfy most of our creative desires, so the temptation was much less.  But now, in our instant gratification society, being careful with where we place our attention is more difficult than ever.  Perhaps the contemplative traditions like Buddhism arose to remind us that it is now up to us to impose on ourselves the control that the environment can no longer exercise over us.

The last few days I knew that my circumstances necessitated that I attend to various work and chores, but I became infected with a desire to watch episodes of the television series "Firefly." It was easier to do this than my work, so I easily caved and watched them.  While enjoyable, my work still needed to be done, only now I had even less time to do it in. 

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"To study Buddhism is to study the self.  To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to become enlightened by all things."
"When other sects speak well of Zen, the first thing that they praise is its poverty."
"If he cannot stop the mind that seeks after fame and profit, he will spend his life without finding peace."
- Dogen

"My sermons are criticized by certain audiences. They say that my sermons are hollow, not holy. I agree with them because I myself am not holy. The Buddha's teaching guides people to the place where there is nothing special... People often misunderstand faith as kind of ecstasy of intoxication... True faith is sobering up from such intoxication."
- Kodo Sawaki

"No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention; let it settle itself."
- Tilopa

neurology of transcendance

How does focusing on a perception of transpersonal experience affect the human brain?  Many members of society want a vocabulary to talk about them and claim their benefits, but the terms used are imprecise and lacking in scientific accuracy.  Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs from his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" placed such peak experiences of self-actualization at the top of his pyramid.  Carl Sagan spoke eloquently of the inspiring nature of the cosmos, and "Einsteinian" religious sentiments are referenced by Dawkins frequently (he has also said that pantheism is "sexed up" atheism).  More recently than that there has been talk about the "New Mysterium" in philosophical circles.  I'll make a naive attempt to define what I mean.