**

Dr. P: How many of you have self-help books? Okay, that's your first problem. You can't help yourself, because your *self* sucks!

**

You're quite good at this game, Mr. Green. I know because I'm quite good at this game.
- Revolver

**

Dunning–Kruger effect From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Part of a series on Psychology

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognise their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.[1]

**

"Looking by, over my shoulder, with an aching deep in my heart"
  - Mike and the Mechanics

**

You need a coach, a friend and a community.

You can learn all the katas alone, from books or videos, but weaving them together , and having a challenge that requires compound skills in a controlled environment that allows failure, review and retries is something you cannot do alone.

You can write something every day.  Reading a passage and then summarising in your own words is a known and recommended way of learning. It also helps concentration along with  knowledge of the  subject matter.
Written notes are the external memory of the human computer. 

The basic necessity list now consists of diet, sleep, exercise,   arts, friends, and do-nothing time.

I have attempted 5BX for a week now, and moved from Chart-1-B to Chart-1-B+. The stress on the body is tremendous. Seven days at each level is simply not enough.  The back also starts going for a toss. Not sure if this is sitting related, or due to the exercise.

The first thing in meditation practice is time and place. It's smoothest to sneak in a few minutes at the easiest time of the day.  I decided to ignore a full stomach and sat after lunch. The second thing would be to give up control to the timer. An app which rings a bell at the start and end of the session lets you offload all thought and action related to session management ,thereby removing all excuses to distract yourself on the basis of this.

‘Mathematics is the music of reason’ – James Joseph Sylvester



Logical thinkers suffer from Cartesian-itis. Or seeing straight lines where there are none. Extrapolate straight lines and you'll get planes, combine planes and you'll get surfaces and other compound objects that are the bread-and-butter (again a western affliction - we prefer rice-and-lentils) of our daily matrix. So seeing boxes or lines or balls or spheres or curves , is seeing abstractions, which by definition are unreal ( see Note1). The affected are many, namely, the large middle of the West - those who are unable to ,either transcend to the top, or are pushed to the bottom.  As Neo said, there is no spoon. There is no spoon of Job Satisfaction, nor Success, defined Cartesian-ically. Hence futile pursuits and trips to shrinks.

Or seeing ghosts . Pirsig goes on and on about Western ghosts. I'm reciting his words now, myself.

When I was in school, a fellow-book-reading-friend told me about ZMM, and that it would change lives. I assumed it'd be about motorcycles, and leather jackets, and that a reader would sort of give up on studiously studying and become 'cool' and ride around the country .
In college, I got a copy and read it. It was relaxing and bike-ridey.
On my first job, I wrangled a text-only copy and would read it, delved into the philosophy part of it.
Sometime later, I started noticing my brain throwing up sentences from the book to match unrelated real world I was thinking about. At some point, I started echoing sentences from the book which I'ld forgotten.

Note 1:
The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

—John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

...