“A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself; indeed, he progresses in all things by making a fool of himself.”
—George Bernard Shaw1
The most vulnerable moment in the life of a public speaker is the question-and-answer period following a talk. Many speakers live in mortal fear of this time. A colleague who is on the lecture circuit revealed to me that for years he has had nightmares about the Killer Question—that devastating little inquiry he has never thought about and for which he has no answer, the query that demolishes all his premises, exposes his ignorance, and leaves him intellectually naked and quivering before a menacing audience. Some speakers will do anything to avoid being interrogated by listeners, for example, by deliberately speaking too long in hopes that the Q & A period will be aborted.
These fears are not unfounded. Although most questioners are cordial, occasionally, there is someone in the audience who likes to play Get the Speaker. Sometimes you can intuit that the Killer Question is on the way. It often begins with a sly compliment, such as, “You have really given us a lot to think about,” but whether the lot is good or bad the questioner does not say. This tactic, damnation by faint praise, has been around a long time; it was mentioned by the Greek philosopher Favorinus around 110 A.D. It is a compliment so feeble that it amounts to no praise at all, and even implies condemnation—calling a baby “interesting” or a reviewer’s admiring a singer’s dress without mentioning her voice. When this sort of false flattery crops up in a Q & A session, it is a diversionary stroke, a guerilla move. It is the bouquet that contains the grenade, which usually doesn’t take long to explode: “But you are aware, are you not, that Jones, in his Nobel-caliber experiment, demonstrated only last week that your entire thesis is nonsense?” Another ominous gambit is when a questioner introduces himself and begins to cite his credentials. This is designed to remove all doubt about his authority, which he then uses to bludgeon the speaker.
An unforgettable experience came at the end of a lecture I gave to a large audience several years ago. I had discussed the role of consciousness in health and the general relationship between spirituality and healing. This is always a risky subject; many people have ambivalent attitudes and unsettled personal issues about spirituality, and some individuals are cynical toward consciousness in general. Nonetheless, generous applause followed the talk. Then it was time for questions. A wiry man rose from the back of the room (Killer Questions always seem to originate near the back of the room) and sauntered confidently to the open microphone up front. “Interesting talk,” he said: the ambiguous warm-up compliment. Then, pausing for effect and gathering himself, he seemed poised to reveal some great secret that had been hidden for millennia. Speaking slowly and without a hint of uncertainty, he announced, “I know a man who regrew his entire leg!” It got worse. “But the foot on the new leg had six toes!” This add-on about the extra toe was delivered quite forcefully. It seemed to be a key observation that, if properly understood, would bring all mysteries into the light. Then the man smiled beatifically and slowly retreated from the mike, giving me a sideways glance.
An awkward hush descended over the crowd, as everyone struggled to decipher the meaning of what they had just heard. I had the feeling that this man’s comments were either a marvelous insight or utter rubbish, but I could not tell which. Was he supremely wise or a fool? An avatar who was challenging me with inscrutable koans? My mind was a blur. I had not the faintest idea how to respond to his statements, which were having a decidedly paralytic effect on me. At light speed, I sifted through the major points I had made in my talk, searching for some link between his comments and mine, but I came up empty. I felt paranoid. My response was typical of a speaker under siege: It’s your responsibility to have the perfect answer for every question—and, if you don’t, IT’S YOUR FAULT AND YOU’RE NOT VERY SMART! The audience waited for my response. When it didn’t come, a low-pitched murmur broke out, like a circling swarm of killer bees.
Then a woman strode to the microphone; the saboteurs were coming in waves now. She looked absolutely mirthless. Fearing two Killer Questions in a row, I braced against the podium with both hands. Emboldened by the first man, she leapfrogged any opening compliment and went straight for the jugular.
“Why do you wear glasses?” she sullenly demanded. “You could get rid of them, you know!” Then she retreated a step back from the mike and stood her ground, as if preparing for my counterattack. She need not have worried. The crowd rallied around her. “Yeah!” someone shouted from the periphery of the room. “You ought to do eye exercises. The Bates method!” Then another voice from the open microphone: “Salamanders regrow legs all the time, and they have excellent vision.”
A connection at last! Someone had made a breakthrough, linking re-grown legs, salamanders, and visual acuity. But what was the reasoning? What on earth did any of this have to do with what I’d been talking about?
Looking onto the sea of faces, I felt I was the only person in the room who could not follow this abstruse logic. My thought processes began to deteriorate. I realized I’d offered no comments whatsoever during the entire Q & A period. I was a chip on the ocean, swept along by forces beyond my control. Clutching the podium like a life raft, I saw another questioner approaching the microphone. The sight filled me with dread. I thought of sharks. “What do you think about environmental pollution, and what steps have you taken in your personal life to stop it?”
My impulse was to say, “None of your business,” but I knew this would only make matters worse. By this time, the situation was hopeless and could not be salvaged. I wasn’t alone in my confusion. Most of the audience was as helpless as I was in cracking the code of the questioners. They were completely turned off and were leaving in droves. Soon, the room was empty, sharks and all.
I learned something valuable that day. Many people are so desperate to make a personal statement or tell their own story that they will grasp any opportunity to do so—by writing a letter to an editor, toting a placard in a demonstration, calling a talk-radio program, or seizing an open microphone at a Q & A session. They are not really interested in your responses as a speaker but are eager to be in the spotlight and capture those fifteen minutes of fame that, Andy Warhol predicted, lie in everyone’s future.
Other questioners are sincere. They genuinely want a clarification from the speaker, or they want to make a point they consider important. Some are able to express their concerns clearly, while others are not. The questioners following my talk were not gifted with clarity. The first man wanted to affirm the possibility of radical healing. His point, I think, was that there may be no limits to healing and that we have capacities we seldom glimpse: the person who, he claimed, regrew a missing leg. Six toes? Perhaps they were evidence that healing often isn’t perfect. Healing is not the rational, predictable process we often consider it to be. Mishaps and surprises occur. Salamanders? The fact that these “lower” creatures regrow limbs routinely suggests that the same feat just might be possible in “higher” creatures such as humans. Eyeglasses? The woman may have been saying that, if we can regrow legs, then improving our vision and getting rid of our glasses should be a minor challenge. Did the man actually regrow a leg? Do salamanders really have good vision? I still don’t know. The connection to environmental pollution? I’m still working on that one.
Being a fool
I once knew an elderly family physician who was on the staff of the hospital where I worked. Unlike the rest of us docs, he shuffled around the hospital in no apparent hurry. His patients, their families, and the nurses adored him. One morning while making hospital rounds, I found myself in the same two-bed room with him—he at the bedside of his patient, I at the bedside of mine. We were separated only by curtains, so I could not avoid overhearing his conversation. At one point, his patient asked him a complicated question. “Well,” he said, “I can’t rightly say. I’m just gonna have to put on my thinkin’ cap and sleep on it”—no phony pretense, just an honest confession that he simply did not know. His patient seemed entirely satisfied with his answer.
To say “I don’t know” is to risk being thought a fool. Although we deplore fools and foolishness, many wisdom traditions consider being a fool a virtue. So did poet Allen Ginsberg, who confessed, “I am a fool. I feel sort of naturally stupid. I don’t pretend to be wise or anything like that. To the extent that I’m wise is that I know I’m dumb. So it leaves room for other people to talk and me to listen.”2
Following my Q & A session, I decided to experiment with permitting myself to be a fool and run the risk of being thought naturally stupid, like Ginsberg. I find that it works splendidly. This approach concedes that one’s comments are not really all that important. This strategy is a lot less stressful than thinking the world will fall apart if you don’t always come up with a stirring rejoinder. This approach may even be good for one’s mental health. As Bertrand Russell said, “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important”3—or, I would add, the belief that one’s answers to questions from the audience are important.
Wes Nisker, the author and meditation teacher, has proposed an alternative to the pretense of knowing that is epidemic in our society. “Just imagine,” he says, “how good it would feel if we all got together once in a while in large public gatherings and admitted that we don’t know why we are alive, that nobody knows for sure if there’s a higher being who created us, and that nobody really knows what the hell’s going on here.”4
If we need a motto to remind us that we are all in the dark, all the time, I propose Sir Arthur Eddington’s ringing endorsement of the mystery that is inherent in modern physics. Speaking of the Uncertainty Principle in the subatomic domain, he observed, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”5
Foolish moments have the uncanny ability to stick in people’s minds and influence them indefinitely. Rudolf Arnheim, the German author and theorist of Gestalt perception, recalls, “At a faculty reception . . . a British lady taught me how to tie my shoes with a double knot so that they keep tied more securely and still come apart in a jiffy. Kneeling on the floor in the midst of the chattering sherry-sippers, she tied my shoes. I remember her twice a day ever since.”6
It must have been a choice moment. I’ve been to my share of faculty receptions, and, although I have occasionally seen people on the floor, they have never been there because of shoe-tying lessons. I suspect that some of the tweedy professors who witnessed the British lady on her knees instructing Arnheim in double knot tying thought her foolish. But as Ginsberg knew, it’s not so bad to be a fool, even if it upsets the sherry-sipping faculty.
W.C. Fields, one of America’s greatest fools, said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try again, then quit. There is no point in making a fool of yourself.”7 I don’t agree. But I am sure Fields was well aware of the advantages of foolishness, and that he was putting us on.
“Fool” is derived from the Latin follis, meaning windbag or bellows. A windbag is hollow or vacant. We speakers, windbags all, ought to pay attention to this aspect of the fool. If we can admit that we are windbags, then we can acknowledge that we are empty, containing nothing but wind. Knowing we are empty makes it easier to say, “I don’t know.”
Mythos and logos
Why are we speakers obsessed with having the perfect response to all questions?
Philosopher-theologian Karen Armstrong, in her landmark book The Battle for God,8 describes how human beings have evolved two main ways of knowing, mythos and logos. Mythos was considered timeless and unchanging and was the foundation for religion and spirituality. Its special area of competence was not practicality but meaning. It shed light on human origins, the purpose of life, the origins of culture, and human destiny following death. Its contribution to human welfare was absolutely essential. Modern research confirms that, without an adequate source of meaning, humans fall into despair and often sicken and die. Mythos was a corrective to this tendency; it lent a depth and richness to life by directing one’s inner gaze to the eternal and the universal.
In contrast, logos was concerned not with meaning but with practicality. It prized reason, intellectuality, analysis, and the human talent for problem solving. It converted the literal lessons of mythos into metaphor and sought to understand the workings of the world outside of a religious context. Beginning in the 1600s, logos evolved into what we now call science, while mythos continued to be anchored as always in religion, revelation, and mystical experience. Following the Enlightenment, logos became the dominant way of knowing for millions of Westerners, who were convinced that mythos had served its purpose and could be safely retired.
It is the intellectually based, logos-driven way of knowing that speakers fall into during Q & A sessions. The format is logical, linear and causal: ask a question, get an answer. Not to know an answer breaks the chain and indicates weakness and ignorance.
Mythos, however, is not so easily dismissed. Just when we think we have retired it from our lives, it bounces back, sometimes in ways that make us look silly—for that is how we often appear when we try to conduct our lives solely with logos, with the intellect. For example, in “The Perils of a Purely Scientific Education,” the Right Reverend William Temple (1881-1944), Archbishop of Canterbury, observed, “It is told of Kepler, the astronomer . . . that having been unhappy in a first marriage he chose a second wife on scientific principles; he eliminated all but eleven of his feminine acquaintances, and then analysed those eleven, setting out the merits and defects in parallel columns. He then married the lady whose analysis displayed the greatest predominance of merit over defect. When this venture also proved a failure, he pronounced the problem insoluble to human reason. So, no doubt it is, if by reason is meant exclusively the use of scientific method.”9
Sir Arthur Eddington, with humor that is all too rare in physicists, also recognized the limitations of logos in relating to one’s spouse. In his famous essay, “Defense of Mysticism,” he said, “The materialist who is convinced that all phenomena arise from electrons and quanta and the like controlled by mathematical formulae must presumably hold the belief that his wife is a rather elaborate differential equation, but he is probably tactful enough not to obtrude this opinion in domestic life.”10
Try as we might, we cannot properly order our lives with logos alone. An example of how the mythos qualities of irrationality and unpredictability play a vital role comes from Abraham Lincoln’s early years. Lincoln sensed that important work lay in his future, but it was unclear how he could accomplish this because of his poverty and extenuating circumstances. Intellectual stimulation and advancement were hard to come by on the frontier, and his future seemed blocked. One day a stranger came by Lincoln’s house with a barrel full of odds and ends. He was in need of money and agreed to sell the entire barrel to Lincoln for a dollar. With his characteristic kindness, Lincoln gave the man the dollar, even though he could not imagine how he would put the junk to use. Later, when he sorted through the barrel’s contents, he discovered a complete edition of Blackstone’s five-volume Commentaries on the laws of the United States and the Constitution. The acquisition of these books enabled Lincoln to become a lawyer and fulfill his destiny as one of the greatest leaders of his or any other time.11
A life without mythos can be unhappy and incomplete. As comedian George Carlin put it, “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” A better distinction between logos and mythos is hard to find.12
One of the most brutally honest descriptions of mythos deficiency is from Charles Darwin’s autobiography. Before the age of 30, Darwin’s life seemed to have been richly balanced between aesthetic and intellectual pursuits. He delighted in music, poetry, and great literature. As he got older, however, he underwent a “curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes.” In his last years, he sadly revealed, “But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost my taste for pictures or music. . . . My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collection of facts. . . .” Darwin saw a possible solution to this state of affairs: “[I]f I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week. . . . The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”13
Taking a cue from Darwin, I have often thought that good lectures ought to be concluded not with a logos-laden interrogation of the speaker but with poetry or music. This would be a better send-off, for both the audience and the speaker, than the typical Q & A session, in which the audience slowly hemorrhages as listeners become bored and leave.
“Nothing happened”
Remember the Harmonic Convergence of 1987? This loosely organized new-age event was intended as a global awakening to love and unity through divine transformation. Initiated by author José Arguelles, it took place on August 17, a date based on the Mayan calendar. On this day, groups of people gathered in various sacred sites and mystical places all over the world—Stonehenge; Mt. Shasta, California; Crestone, Colorado; and elsewhere.14
As the celebration approached, I set aside my logos-based skepticism and decided to attend a sunrise gathering on an empty field surrounding a community college in Dallas, where Barbara, my wife, and I lived at the time. I knew that a great many unreconstructed hippies would be there, and, as a holdover from the 60s myself, I wanted to be with them. People began arriving in predawn blackness, at least an hour before sunrise. We groped our way along, formed a circle, and held hands. Someone started singing a flower-generation song, everyone joined in, and the old magic of the 60s took hold. Then people began chatting among themselves. It was still dark, and people in the circle were only shadows. The woman on my right whispered to me that this occasion reminded her of something she had recently read in a book by some writer named Larry Dossey. “I know what you mean,” I said.
As the sun came up, we greeted it with silence. After it cleared the horizon, everyone quietly dispersed as if on cue. My heart was full. As I walked to my car, I passed a young man in his early twenties sitting on the hood of his auto, staring blankly into space. “You OK?” I asked. After a while he responded, “Nothing happened. Not a thing! Not a damned thing!” “Perhaps that was the point,” I said. “Yeah, I’m OK,” he said in disgust, sliding off the hood. He started his car and zoomed away.
He was partly correct. Nothing happened, and yet everything happened: sunrise, earth, life, friendship, community. Locked in logos, he was blind to the miracles all around him. Had he been more of a fool, perhaps he would have had enough emptiness for mystery and small things to enter.
We are compound creatures, gifted with the capacity for both mythos and logos. We are at our best when these two faculties are in balance. There is a tendency, however, in some people, when they sense the power of mythos, to give everything over to it (just as intellectuals and scientists often cede everything to logos). Enchanted by mythos, they often trot out authorities who have championed a life of spontaneity and going with the flow, such as John Lennon and his well-worn observation, “Life is what happens while you are making other plans.”15 But Lennon was no do-nothing; he was a vigorous achiever, as his astonishing oeuvre demonstrates. Lennon honored both the rational and the intuitive, mythos and logos, doing and letting go.
Some planning is always necessary, exemplified in the joke about the bitter man who shakes his fist at the sky and curses God for not answering his prayers to win the lottery. Suddenly a voice thunders from the heavens: “Buy a ticket!”
Life is never a question of either mythos or logos. Multiple levels of engagement can operate simultaneously. A certain amount of intellectual rigor is present in every great artist. If this were not so, Vermeer would not have known how to mix his paints, and Michelangelo would not have known how to select the finest block of marble. Just so, every great scientist has a mythic dimension to his analytical thought processes. The annals of science are replete with examples in which scientists have made stunning breakthroughs in dreams and reverie, when the intellect was stymied.
When psychologist Carl Jung was traveling in Ceylon in 1938, he witnessed an occasion in which the simultaneous levels of mythos and logos were openly acknowledged in people’s lives. Two peasants collided with each other, getting their carts stuck on a narrow street. Jung waited for the eruption of the accusations, cursing, and fist shaking that would have happened if the incident had taken place in Europe, but this did not happen. Instead, the two men bowed to each other and said, “Passing disturbance, no soul!” By this expression, they meant that disturbances such as this take place only outwardly, but not on the deepest level of reality where perfection reigns and where the collision of two carts makes nary a ripple. Of this realization, Jung said, “One might think this almost unbelievable in such simple people. One stands amazed.”16
Perhaps, when my arguments collide with those of critics following a lecture, and our positions get stuck in the narrow lanes of logic, I can learn to bow to the questioner and say, “Passing disturbance, no soul.”
“Do you have a light?”
I am sympathetic to most people who query a speaker following a talk. This does not come easily for most individuals, which I painfully learned during my internship.
I grew up in the fire-and-brimstone religious culture of central Texas. When I went to the University of Texas at Austin and fell in love with science, I jettisoned those early religious beliefs in favor of an agnostic, intellectual, logos-driven approach to life. Later, during the final two years of medical school, I began to regrow my spiritual roots. I became attracted to the spiritual traditions of the East, took up meditation, and found a sense of fulfillment that had been missing in my early religious life. Among the scholars then writing was philosopher Alan Watts, the expert in comparative religion, Buddhism, and other Eastern traditions. Watts’ books are gems of sanity and clarity, and I found them transformative.
During my internship, Watts visited Dallas to deliver a lecture at Southern Methodist University. It was an opportunity I could not pass up, so I got a fellow intern to cover for me at the hospital so I could attend. The lecture was in an ornate auditorium on the SMU campus. The hall was packed, and I barely managed to get a seat in the back.
Watts was at his oratorical best: penetrating, witty, brilliant. As he spoke, I realized the immense debt I owed him. During the intermission, I saw him standing alone by a marble column across the foyer. He was smoking a miniature Erik cigar, which, rumor had it, was only one of his vices. This was my opportunity to express my gratitude. But as I navigated through the chattering crowd, I became extremely nervous. Within seconds, I experienced the most profound case of stage fright imaginable. My mind blurred, my heart pounded, I hyperventilated, I sweated, I thought I was going to pass out. Even though I was a wreck, I was unable to stop walking toward Watts. My body was no longer under my command. Soon I was face to face with him, completely out of control. Watts looked at me kindly, still puffing on his Erik. Then I heard myself say, “Do you have a cigarette?” This was crazy; I did not smoke. He opened his pack of Eriks and handed me one. Then I heard myself say, “Do you have a light?” He struck a match, and I somehow managed to get the damned thing lit without coughing. “Thank you,” I said. Still an automaton, I turned and walked away. Watts died unexpectedly a few years later, so this proved to be the only chance I had to share my gratitude with the remarkable man who was pivotal in my spiritual development. And I blew it, big time.
So I know from personal experience how difficult it can be to approach speakers. Since my encounter with Watts, I have never taken questions and comments from an audience lightly.
Years later, the situation was reversed. I had spoken to an audience about the role of the mind in health, focusing on questions of meaning, and how we often trivialize illness by assigning identical interpretations of an illness to everyone. This approach, I said, makes no sense, because of the unique trajectory of each person’s life. Because two lives never follow the same path, the meaning of an illness can never be the same for everyone. I came down on the side of mystery, suggesting that sometimes we must simply be with the illness and resist the temptation to interpret it.
The audience had left the auditorium, and I was collecting my notes at the podium, preparing to return to my hotel. Then I glanced up and saw that a woman had reentered the rear of the lecture hall and was walking hesitantly toward the front. We were the only people in the room, so it was obvious she wanted to say something to me. She was extraordinarily shy. “Years ago I had metastatic cancer,” she whispered. “My friends said it meant all sorts of things, and they told me what I needed to do. I was terrified. I didn’t do any of the things they recommended. The cancer eventually disappeared without treatment. You know what I did to make it go away? Nothing! And nobody wants to hear my story.” Then she began to weep.
So I heard her story, and we shared a cry. I cannot calculate how much courage was required for her to come forward—exposed, vulnerable, alone. I just listened—no clever responses, just a naturally stupid fool sitting silently in the mystery of illness.
It was the best answer I ever gave.
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