VirtualChaos – Nadeem’s blog

Just under two years ago I read and reviewed Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I remember at the time hoping that Drew Karpyshyn would write a sequel. I felt that Bane was an incredibly well realised character and one that the reader is drawn to and serves to illustrate that good and evil aren’t necessarily absolutes. A couple of weeks ago I was pleased to learn that a sequel had been released so I bought a copy and read it in the space of two evenings.

Darth Bane: The Rule of Two continues where the previous book ended. Darth Bane is now the Dark Lord of the Sith after destroying the entire Sith order who had united under the banner of The Brotherhood of Darkness. In Bane’s eyes The Brotherhood of Darkness with it’s emphasis on equality was a perversion of the true ideals of the Sith and had to be destroyed so the Sith order could be rebuilt based on it’s oldest law. As the last surviving Sith Darth Bane promulgated a harsh new directive: The Rule of Two:

  Only two there should be; no more, no less.
     One to embody the power, the other to crave it.

At the beginning of the book, after Brotherhood have all been destroyed by a thought bomb, Bane comes across a young ten year old girl who is sensitive to the Force, and who in a fit of rage kills two Jedi. Though she is young Rain possesses an instinctive link to the dark side that rivals his own. Bane is impressed by her power and takes her as his apprentice: Darth Zannah. With his guidance she will become essential in his quest to destroy the Jedi and dominate the galaxy.

It’s a wonderfully entertaining book, that captivates from beginning to end. We learn more about Bane and his ambitions and his quest for greater knowledge and power. We watch as he continuously tests his young apprentice and we are not only drawn into his scheming but also into hers. This serves to constantly remind the reader that the essence of the Rule of Two is that the Apprentice will one day grow stronger or more cunning than his/her own master and on that day must kill the Master, assume the mantle of Dark Lord of the Sith, and find an apprentice to train in the ways of the Dark Side.

I wont reveal much more of the plot but I will recommend this book, as a great bit of fun reading … also I really hope there is a follow up since Bane’s story definitely does not end with this book.

Having spent the previous evening working till way past midnight, I decided to keep my laptop switched off yesterday – It was Saturday after all! Besides I’d come to a realisation earlier in the week. That although I really love what I do at Talis, I’ve been using my work, rightly or wrongly, as a way to hide from other things that I haven’t figured out how to deal with.

Death

    Mole came to Raven privately and said, "We haven't talked
about death very much. I'm not concerned about where I will
go, but watching so many family members die, I'm wondering
what happens at the point of death?".
   Raven sat silently for a while, then said, "I give away my
belongings".

After visiting dad’s grave yesterday morning, I decided to take a trip into the city center and do a little shopping – wasn’t really sure what I was shopping for. I’ve been having strange moments like that a lot recently – strange in the sense that I’m doing things that feel random, they don’t necessarily have any purpose at the outset. Anyway after buying a couple of DVD’s and some clothes, I ended up at Borders Book Shop in the Bull Ring.

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I simply walked from one aisle of books to another glancing at the shelves to see if anything caught my eye. I love Science Fiction and Fantasy novels so I did consciously walk over to that area and spent a while there but didn’t find anything that really stood out. I also spent a fair bit of time rifling through a bunch of Manga novels but I aready own all the good stuff and some of the newer series have proven to be disappointing. Eventually I ended up in the section entitled Philosophy / Spirituality – that’s when I found “Zen Master Raven: Sayings and Doings of a Wise Bird“. When I got back home I proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon and much of the evening reading it from cover to cover, twice! Here’s why …

I had this terrible feeling that whilst I understood much of it … there’s a huge amount of meaning within it’s covers that I simply can’t figure out … yet … It feels like a thorn in my mind … and I love it …

The Spirit of the Practice

    Relaxing with the others after zazen one evening, Owl
asked "What is the Spirit of the practice?"
    Raven said, "Inquiry."
    Owl cocked his head and asked, "What do I inquire
about?"
    Raven said, "Good start."

I think it’s a wonderfully delightful book. The author Robert Aitken, is a well known American Zen Master, whilst he has written a number of other books and essays this piece is very different. His literary device of using animals, unconventional in Zen, is remarkably successful in presenting the promises and risks, hopes and fears of the Tallspruce community that Raven Roshi shares with his students, neighbours and friends. I think this book captures the spirit of Zen as much as any book can, and it demonstrates how Zen can become the practice of a lifetime.

Character

    One evening, in a discussion of his personal problems,
Raven asked Brown Bear, "What is the role of character in
the practise?"
    Brown Bear said, "I try to keep my promises."
    Raven said, "I try to keep my promises, too, but I'm easily
distracted."
    Brown Bear said, "The cold wind reminds me."

Aitken’s book is the distillation of a collection of stories, some only a few sentences in length, that, as he sees it, illuminate the Way. These stories are succinct, charming and contain a huge depth of insight. The stories might feel weird, but are hugely compelling.

Very Special

    In a group munching grubs one afternoon, Mole
remarked, "The Buddha Shakyamuni was very special
wasn't he! I'm sure there has never been anyone like
him".
    Raven said, "Like the madrone."
    Mole asked, "How is the madrone unique?"
    Raven said, "Every madrone leaf."
    Mole fell silent.
    Procupine asked, "How does the uniqueness of every
Madrone leaf relate to the practice?"
    Raven said, "Your practice."

Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck by Chip and Dan Heath is absolutely brilliant!

At many times in our lives and especially within the context of business at some point you will need to get a point across that is critical to your success and the success of those around you. If you are in a relationship the very same thing is true. That success comes down to your ability to create a compelling communication. At it’s core thats what this book is about – communication – and it provides many examples of how to successfully communicate ideas but also what makes them stick. Conveying a message well is good, but conveying that message and having people act upon it is better, and invariably that’s what makes ideas stick.

If you haven’t read this then you need to!

The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun is a small but powerful book about innovation.

Scott has a wonderfully engaging writing style – it’s friendly, conversational, full of humor and informative, which I found was extremely well suited to the task in hand. He provides examples of how innovation works, where innovation comes from, and debunks several popular myths of innovation, pointing out that whilst there is a ‘eureka’ moment, there’s a whole lot of hard work which lead up to it in the first place.

For me this was actually quite profound given that myself, Rob, Chris, Alan and Ross spent a month sequestered away working on developing a prototype – we were given the shortest of briefs a problem to solve and were asked to come up with something compelling and innovative – during the course of that month we had our own ‘eureka’ moments and we can certainly attest to the hard work that was involved before we reached that point. In fact it’s something I’ll talk about far more when I discuss another book: Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks.

As for Scott’s book it really is well worth reading and I can’t help but agree with Don Norman who said this about the book:

The naked truth about innovation is ugly, funny and eye-opening, but it sure isn’t what most of us have come to believe. With this book, Berkun sets us free to try to change the world, unencumbered with misconceptions about how innovation happens.

I finally managed to finish reading several books. The first I want to talk about is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom.

This is a excellent book that makes a very compelling case for decentralization in organizations and businesses. The authors contrast the Spider which represents top-down management, with the Starfish which is essentially headless … all its “legs” go in any direction it wants to … but the starfish still moves and is effective.

Whilst the first few chapters of the book present a couple of case studies and examples that serve to illustrate the main themes of the book. It’s really from chapter four onwards that the book picks up pace as the authors discuss operational principles behind decentralised organisations – the need for pre-existing networks as a substrate, the role of catalysts and champions to activate leaderless organisation, “circles” as their chief co-ordination mechanism, and “ideology” as the glue holding everything more or less together.

After reading the book I’m left feeling that the notion of leaderless organisations is unquestionably superior both morally and aesthetically – to centralised organisations. Partly because of their structural simplicity and elegance, but also, and more profoundly from my point of view, because they rely so openly on trust and the belief that man is fundamentally good and ultimately because they are capable of drawing the best from people and providing them with truthfulness, meaning and purpose in their life.

It’s interesting to also reflect on the fact that not only do organisations like Alcoholics Anonymous operate as a decentralised organisation, but also organisations like Al Qaeda, and it’s the very nature of that de-centralisation that makes them so difficult to contain.

As an interesting follow up to reading the book here’s a talk Rod Beckstrom gave at Next Web in 2007, that touches on the main themes in the book:

A relative of mine proclaimed over the weekend … “Nadeem, I have a book you might find really interesting“ and presented me with this: John Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel – an Angelic Riposte to The God Delusion.

 I started reading it as soon as my cousin handed it to me, in fact I didn’t put it down till I’d finished it! It’s not a very long book, only about 160 pages, it should be noted though that the pages have unusually wide margins and considerably less text per page than most books I’ve read do. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s both an engrossing read but also a lot shorter than you might think when you pick it up, and whilst most people probably wouldn’t want to read it in a single sitting it’s definitely possible.

The book is basically written as an open letter to Richard Dawkins in which Cornwell, adopting the persona of a guardian angel attempts to correct the lapses of judgement in The God Delusion. Where this book differs from many of the critiques written in response to Dawkins various works is that Cornwell doesn’t fall into personal attacks, anger, or vitriol. Instead Cornwell exposes the inadequacies of Dawkins’ arguments in a gentle way which is far more devastating in its effect than anything I have ever read by Dawkins.

In fact I was hugely disappointed with Dawkin’s The God Delusion. After all his posing and positioning as an intellectual, a man of reason, a skeptic, a Humanist, I was horrified to see him use pseudo-medical terminology to try to describe religion as a virus and believers of religion as carriers of a fatal disease that is infecting the body of humanity. I mean, wasn’t it the Third Reich that used this kind of language to justify it’s atrocities against ‘Jews’ and many others? I honestly thought it was shameful for Dawkins to resort to these methods. It rang alarm bells in my head … the language and irrational venom was the sort of the thing I’d expect from a theo-fascist like Sam Harris, and the fact that Dawkin’s wont distance himself from Harris finally begins to make sense to me. Harris was the one who infamously wrote:

Certain beliefs place adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self defense.

I distinctly get the impression, these days, that Dawkin’s and Harris’ brand of militant atheism is little more than a personality cult. Whenever I’ve visited www.richarddawkins.net I always get the uneasy feeling that Dawkin’s wishes to replace what he sees as a belief in a fictitious God with belief in a utopia that he himself has imagined or has Cornwell accuses him of  “substituting yourself for God”… and why not it’s big business right … ask the Scientologists Sadly what seems to escape Dawkins’s and his followers is that the militant form of atheism they are advocating is no different or less irrational than any other organised religion.

Anyway I’m digressing … back to Darwin’s Angel.

I guess one of the reason’s I found Cornwell’s book so enlightening is that it calmly and rationally exposes how Dawkin’s and his followers have failed to see a distinction between benign religion and dangerous fanaticism … in fact I’d go as far as to say that not only have they failed to see it but they are guilty of the very same fanaticism they attribute to religious believers. In fact Cornwell starts off the book by pointing out to Dawkins that it is wrong to bundle all religious beliefs and practise into a bag that supposedly equals fanaticism – it’s no different to saying that all science is dangerous because scientists created the nuclear bomb.

I think it was Cornwell’s chapter on Imagination that touched me the most. I found myself agreeing with him when he argued that you couldn’t simply ban religious imagination without banning the same impulses that have inspired artists and poets:

.. but you are also disturbed by imagination, aren’t you? It’s so close to art, music, poetry – stuff that’s made up rather than facts that can be reducible to physics, chemistry and biology … Biology is true whereas the other stuff is just made up! It sounds as though you would substitute a set of case notes on dementia for Shakespeare’s King Lear; or a horticultural fact sheet for Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”. Elsewhere you permit a role for literature in a science-ruled utopia, provided that it is confined to anodyne tropes about “ineffable” sunsets and “sublime” landscapes …you appear in this new book to have definitely retreated from a trust in the dynamic, protean power of imagination when it comes to religion. Have you retreated because you no longer believe in the power of the imagination to impart literary, poetic, religious and moral truth either? Or because trust in imagination threatens your militant atheism? 

This really is a wonderful book and in many was serves a robust corrective to Dawkin’s The God Delusion … I thoroughly recommend it!