Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch

David Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity: 10th Anniversary Edition is a series of short one to a few page compact life lessons and remembrances about the topics of meditation, consciousness, and creativity. I heard him interviewed on NPR and found his ideas to be helpful.

In order to be creative you have to understand suffering but it is not necessary to live it. Pain and suffering will reduce the ability to be creative. Sleep, meditation and self care is necessary for optimal creativity.

David is a big proponent of transcendental meditation. He needs to do it as part of his daily practice. It is the source of his ideas and ability to be creative.

If you have a desire to be creative and to accomplish project you need to have time. Try to find a job that provides food, enough time for sleep, and time to work on your creative projects.

Ideas do not come to us fully formed. We desire and search for an idea and we may only get a fragment. If we write down this idea we can use it as bait or a starting point for additional ideas that can build on the initial fragment. Eventually there is an actionable creative piece that will arise.

David Lynch - Suffering - 3 minutes

Where do ideas come from - 2 min. 

Find time to do what you love - 1 min.

Bozo Sapiens by Michael and Ellen Kaplan

Husband and wife authors Michael and Ellen Kaplan wade into the familiar topic of human mental inadequacies with a well researched, uncomfortable, and sometimes tragic book, Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err is Human.

The book is full of wisdom and bears a repeat read. I dog-eared many pages while reading the text. Sample quote: "Marxist historical theory is a usefully simple heuristic if your purpose is to start a dorm-room argument, gain tenure at a minor college, or establish a peasant insurgency." The authors state history is much more interesting if we seek to understand the biographies of the people, the many waves of changes, and the unanswerable questions.

A good approach to make sure thinking is well thought out is to forcefully argue for the opposite position. It is easy for all of us to be confident that we've received wisdom that is unassailable and ignore the rest of the inconvenient evidence. To illustrate the dangers of "motivated reasoning," the authors relayed the WWI story of a dying French general who spent 4 months planning a bold charge into the teeth of a well fortified German position.  The Germans got wind of the plan and they were well prepared with machine guns and ammunition. The French knew this but ignored the information. By the time the attack was finished, 1/6th of the French Army was dead.

In order for some really bad things to happen "the holes in the slices of Swiss cheese need to line up." Most of us are only aware of one slice and do not know of the existence of the other slices. We should not take comfort that an event is rare. It only takes ten days for a 1 in a million failure to happen in a company with a 100,000 people. It's why holding on to the handrail going up and down stairs is a good idea. Given enough attempts eventually a step will be missed and an injury will result.

You can also visit Michael Kaplan at his Bozo Sapiens Blog where you will find a daily calendar with historical examples of bozo sapiens in action. 

Biz Buzz with Gary Brown - Three lessons from Bozo Sapiens - 3 min. 

The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim by Scott Alan Roberts

While I was taking a backgrounds to literature class at the University, I did a brief paper on Genesis 6: relating the transition from the creation stories to the flood story. Mr. Roberts takes a much deeper dive with his The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim: The Untold Story of Fallen Angels, Giants on the Earth, and Their Extraterrestrial Origins than I did. The author attended divinity school and has a knowledge of ancient Hebrew which helps in understanding the text. The author has great enthusiasm for the topic but does approach it with some humility recognizing that sorting out the wide array of opinions on the ancient scriptures is daunting.

I would suggest approaching this topic from one of pure curiosity rather than from a position of justifying specific dogma. It is an entertaining and enlightening journey in a quest to explore differing views as to who these people are. Many cultures share a story about a great flood and some of these also have varying versions of stories about the Nephilim.

The apocryphal Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilee also provide source material fill in the gaps of Genesis and to determine more about these people and a possible second group referred to as the Watchers in the Book of Enoch.

The author wisely spends a significant portion of the book providing background information to allow some understanding the world of these Nephilim. Without the background information the terrain would be very unfamiliar similar to a Martian landscape.

While I was reading this book, I also listened to the Great Courses lectures on Myth in Human History by Professor Grant L. Voth. Occasionally the information from the book and the course would cover similar ground and provide a deeper understanding of the topic. As a prelude to this book and the course on Myth, I would recommend reading or listening to a translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Exposed and Classified Scott Alan Roberts - 74 min.

Chapter one  from the Rise and Fall of the Nephilim - 75 min. 

Radio interview with Scott Alan Roberts - 44 min.