Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosody (particularly his concept of sprung rhythm and use of imagery) established him as an innovative writer of verse. Two of his major themes were nature and religion.

Oxford and the priesthood

Hopkins studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford (1863–1867).^[6] He began his time in Oxford as a keen socialite and prolific poet, but he seemed to have alarmed himself with the changes in his behaviour that resulted. At Oxford he forged a lifelong friendship with Robert Bridges (eventual Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom), which would be of importance in his development as a poet and in establishing his posthumous acclaim.^[6] Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, meeting him in 1864.^[7] During this time he studied with the eminent writer and critic Walter Pater, who tutored him in 1866 and who remained a friend until Hopkins left Oxford in September 1879.^[3][8]

On 18 January 1866, Hopkins composed his most ascetic poem, The Habit of Perfection. On 23 January, he included poetry in the list of things to be given up for Lent. In July, he decided to become a Roman Catholic, and he travelled to Birmingham in September to consult the leader of the Oxford converts, John Henry Newman.^[7] Newman received him into the Roman Catholic Church on 21 October 1866.

The decision to convert estranged him from both his family and a number of his acquaintances. After his graduation in 1867, Hopkins was provided by Newman with a teaching post at the Oratory in Birmingham. While there he began to study the violin. On 5 May 1868 Hopkins firmly “resolved to be a religious.” Less than a week later, he made a bonfire of his poems and gave up poetry almost entirely for seven years. He also felt the call to enter the ministry and decided to become a Jesuit. He paused to first visit Switzerland, which officially forbade Jesuits to enter.^[3][9]

Hopkins began his Jesuit novitiate at Manresa House, Roehampton, in September 1868. Two years later, he moved to St Mary’s Hall, Stonyhurst, for his philosophical studies, taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience on 8 September 1870.^[10] He felt his interest in poetry prevented him from wholly devoting himself to religion. However, on reading Duns Scotus in 1872 he saw that the two need not conflict.^[11] He continued to write a detailed prose journal between 1868 and 1875. Unable to suppress his desire to describe the natural world, he also wrote music, sketched, and for church occasions wrote some “verses,” as he called them. He would later write sermons and other religious pieces.

In 1874 Hopkins returned to Manresa House to teach classics. While he was studying in the Jesuit house of theological studies, St Beuno’s, near St Asaph in North Wales, he was asked by his religious superior to write a poem to commemorate the foundering of a German ship in a storm. So in 1875 he was moved to take up poetry once more and write a lengthy poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland“. The work was inspired by the Deutschland incident, a maritime disaster in which 157 people died, including five Franciscan nuns who had been leaving Germany due to harsh anti-Catholic laws (see Kulturkampf). The work displays both the religious concerns and some of the unusual meter and rhythms of his subsequent poetry not present in his few remaining early works. It not only depicts the dramatic events and heroic deeds but also tells of the poet’s reconciling the terrible events with God’s higher purpose. The poem was accepted but not printed by a Jesuit publication. This rejection fed his ambivalence about his poetry. Most of his poetry remained unpublished until after his death.

Hopkins chose the austere and restrictive life of a Jesuit and was at times gloomy. Biographer Robert Bernard Martin notes that “the life expectancy of a man becoming a novice at twenty-one was twenty-three more years rather than the forty years of males of the same age in the general population.”^[12] The brilliant student who had left Oxford with a first-class honours degree failed his final theology exam. This failure almost certainly meant that, although ordained in 1877, Hopkins would not progress in the order. In 1877 he wrote God’s Grandeur, an array of sonnets which included “The Starlight Night”. He finished “The Windhover” only a few months before his ordination. Though rigorous, isolated and sometimes unpleasant, his life during Jesuit training had at least some stability; the uncertain and varied work after ordination was even harder on his sensibilities. In October 1877, not long after he completed “The Sea and the Skylark” and only a month after he had been ordained as a priest, Hopkins took up his duties as subminister and teacher at Mount St. Mary’s College, Chesterfield. In July 1878 he became curate at the Jesuit church in Mount Street, London. In December he became curate at St. Aloysius’s Church, Oxford, then moving to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow.^[3] While ministering in Oxford, he became a founding member of Oxford University Newman Society, a society established in 1878 for the Catholic members of the University of Oxford. He taught Greek and Latin at Mount St Mary’s College, Sheffield, and Stonyhurst College, Lancashire.

In 1884 he became professor of Greek and Latin at University College Dublin.^[13] His English roots and his disagreement with the Irish politics of the time, as well as his own small stature (5 feet 2 inches), unprepossessing nature and personal oddities meant that he was not a particularly effective teacher. This as well as his isolation in Ireland deepened his gloom. His poems of the time, such as “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, not Day”, reflected this. They came to be known as the “terrible sonnets”, not because of their quality but because according to Hopkins’s friend Canon Richard Watson Dixon, they reached the “terrible crystal”, meaning that they crystallised the melancholic dejection that plagued the later part of Hopkins’ life.

Poetry

“The sonnets of desolation”

According to John Bayley, “All his life Hopkins was haunted by the sense of personal bankruptcy and impotence, the straining of ‘time’s eunuch’ with no more to ‘spend’…” a sense of inadequacy, graphically expressed in his last sonnets.^[17] Toward the end of his life, Hopkins suffered several long bouts of depression. The “terrible sonnets” are a group of poems in which Hopkins struggles with problems of religious doubt. He described them to Bridges as “[t]he thin gleanings of a long weary while.”^[18]

“Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord” (1889) echoes Jeremiah 12:1 in asking why do the wicked prosper. It reflects the exasperation of the faithful servant who feels he has been neglected, and is addressed to a divine person (“Sir”) capable of hearing the complaint but seemingly unwilling to listen.^[19] Hopkins uses parched roots as a metaphor for despair.

The image of the poet’s feeling estranged from God figures in “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day” in which he describes lying awake before dawn likening his prayers to “dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away.” The opening line recalls Lamentations 3:2, “He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light.”

“No Worst, There is None” and “Carrion Comfort” are also counted among the “terrible sonnets”.

Sprung rhythm

Much of Hopkins’s historical importance has to do with the changes he brought to the form of poetry, which ran contrary to conventional ideas of metre. Prior to Hopkins, most Middle English and Modern English poetry was based on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of English literary heritage. This structure is based on repeating “feet” of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Hopkins called this structure “running rhythm”, and though he wrote some of his early verse in running rhythm he became fascinated with the older rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of which Beowulf is the most famous example. Hopkins called his own rhythmic structure sprung rhythm. Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot. It is similar to the “rolling stresses” of Robinson Jeffers, another poet who rejected conventional metre. Hopkins saw sprung rhythm as a way to escape the constraints of running rhythm, which he said inevitably pushed poetry written in it to become “same and tame.” In this way, Hopkins sprung rhythm can be seen as anticipating much of free verse. His work has no great affinity with either of the contemporary Pre-Raphaelite and neo-romanticism schools, although he does share their descriptive love of nature and he is often seen as a precursor to modernist poetry or as a bridge between the two poetic eras.

Use of language

The language of Hopkins’s poems is often striking. His imagery can be simple, as in Heaven-Haven, where the comparison is between a nun entering a convent and a ship entering a harbour out of a storm. It can be splendidly metaphysical and intricate, as it is in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, where he leaps from one image to another to show how each thing expresses its own uniqueness, and how divinity reflects itself through all of them.

Hopkins was a supporter of linguistic purism in English. In an 1882 letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins writes: “It makes one weep to think what English might have been; for in spite of all that Shakespeare and Milton have done … no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity”.^[21] He took time to learn Old English, which became a major influence on his writing. In the same letter to Bridges he calls Old English “a vastly superior thing to what we have now”.^[22]

He uses many archaic and dialect words, but also coins new words. One example of this is twindles, which seems from its context in Inversnaid to mean a combination of twines and dwindles. He often creates compound adjectives, sometimes with a hyphen (such as dapple-dawn-drawn falcon) but often without, as in rolling level underneath him steady air. This use of compound adjectives, similar to the Old English use of compounds nouns, concentrates his images, communicating the instressof the poet’s perceptions of an inscape to his reader.

Added richness comes from Hopkins’s extensive use of alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and rhyme, both at the end of lines and internally as in:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Hopkins was influenced by the Welsh language that he acquired while studying theology at St Beuno’s near St Asaph. The poetic forms of Welsh literature and particularly cynghanedd with its emphasis on repeating sounds accorded with his own style and became a prominent feature of his work. This reliance on similar-sounding words with close or differing senses means that his poems are best understood if read aloud. An important element in his work is Hopkins’s own concept of “inscape” which was derived, in part, from the medieval theologian Duns Scotus. Anthony Domestico explains,

Inscape, for Hopkins, is the charged essence, the absolute singularity that gives each created thing its being; instress is both the energy that holds the inscape together and the process by which this inscape is perceived by an observer. We instress the inscape of a tulip, Hopkins would say, when we appreciate the particular delicacy of its petals, when we are enraptured by its specific, inimitable shade of pink.”^[23]

The Windhover aims to depict not the bird in general but instead one instance and its relation to the breeze. This is just one interpretation of Hopkins’s most famous poem, one which he felt was his best.^[4]

During his lifetime, Hopkins published few poems. It was only through the efforts of Robert Bridges that his works were seen. Despite Hopkins burning all his poems on entering the Jesuit novitiate, he had already sent some to Bridges who, with a few other friends, was one of the few people to see many of them for some years. After Hopkins’s death they were distributed to a wider audience, mostly fellow poets, and in 1918 Bridges, by then poet laureate, published a collected edition; an expanded edition, prepared by Charles Williams, appeared in 1930, and a greatly expanded edition by William Henry Gardner appeared in 1948 (eventually reaching a fourth edition, 1967, with N. H. Mackenzie).

Notable collections of Hopkins’s manuscripts and publications are in Campion Hall, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Foley Library at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.

Erotic

Timothy d’Arch Smith, antiquarian bookseller, ascribes to Hopkins suppressed erotic impulses which he views as taking on a degree of specificity after Hopkins met Robert Bridges‘s distant cousin, friend, and fellow Etonian Digby Mackworth Dolben, “a Christian Uranian“.^[25] Robert Martin asserts that when Hopkins first met Dolben, on Dolben’s 17th birthday, in Oxford in February 1865, it “was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of [his] undergraduate years, probably of his entire life.”^[26] According to Robert Martin, “Hopkins was completely taken with Dolben, who was nearly four years his junior, and his private journal for confessions the following year proves how absorbed he was in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts of him.”^[27] Martin is also of the opinion that “…it is probable that [Hopkins] would have been deeply shocked at the reality of sexual intimacy with another person.”^[28]

Hopkins composed two poems about Dolben, “Where art thou friend” and “The Beginning of the End.” Robert Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben’s poems as well as Hopkins’s, cautioned that the second poem “must never be printed,” though Bridges himself included it in the first edition (1918).^[29] Another indication of the nature of his feelings for Dolben is that Hopkins’s high Anglican confessor seems to have forbidden him to have any contact with Dolben except by letter. Their relationship was abruptly ended by Dolben’s drowning in June 1867, an event which greatly affected Hopkins, although his feeling for Dolben seems to have cooled a good deal by that time. “Ironically, fate may have bestowed more through Dolben’s death than it could ever have bestowed through longer life … [for] many of Hopkins’s best poems — impregnated with an elegiac longing for Dolben, his lost beloved and his muse — were the result.”^[30] Hopkins’ relationship with Dolben is explored in the novel The Hopkins Conundrum.^[31]

Some of Hopkins’ poems, such as The Bugler’s First Communion and Epithalamion, arguably embody homoerotic themes, although this second poem was arranged by Robert Bridges from extant fragments.^[32] One contemporary literary critic, M. M. Kaylor, has argued for Hopkins’s inclusion with the Uranian poets, a group whose writings derived, in many ways, from the prose works of Walter Pater, Hopkins’s academic coach for his Greats exams, and later his lifelong friend.^[33][34][35]

Some critics have argued that homoerotic readings are either highly tendentious, or, that they can be classified under the broader category of “homosociality,” over the gender, sexual-specific “homosexual” term. Hopkins’s journal writings, they argue, offer a clear admiration for feminised beauty. In his book Hopkins Reconstructed(2000), Justus George Lawler critiques Robert Martin’s controversial biography Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (1991) by suggesting that Martin “cannot see the heterosexual beam… for the homosexual biographical mote in his own eye… it amounts to a slanted eisegesis“. The poems that elicit homoerotic readings can be read not merely as exercises in sublimation but as powerful renditions of religious conviction, a conviction that caused strain in his family and even led him to burn some of his poems that he felt were unnecessarily self-centred. Julia Saville’s book A Queer Chivalry views the religious imagery in the poems as Hopkins’s way of expressing the tension with homosexual identity and desire.

Christopher Ricks notes that Hopkins engaged in a number of penitential practices, “… but all of these self-inflictions were not self-inflictions to him, and they are his business—or are his understanding of what it was for him to be about his Father’s business.”^[12] Ricks takes issue with Martin’s apparent lack of appreciation of the importance of the role of Hopkins’ religious commitment to his writing, and cautions against assigning a priority of influence to any sexual instincts over other factors such as Hopkins’ estrangement from his family.^[12] Biographer Paul Mariani finds in Hopkins poems “… an irreconcilable tension—on the one hand, the selflessness demanded by Jesuit discipline; on the other, the seeming self-indulgence of poetic creation.”^[23]

More at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins

Assembly 2018 from Prosperos Video on Vimeo.

Assembly 2018 – Long Beach, California
August 31 – September 3, 2018
www.theprosperos.org/community/assy2018

Join us Friday June 22^nd at 3 PM Pacific time, 6 Pm Eastern time on ACIM Gather at Paltalk. Please join us for an hour of discovery and fellowship.

Creative Identity

The suppression of creative urges damages our sense of self and identity.  For most of us growing up in a western culture our creative urges were pushed under the surface of our consciousness. Sexually speaking these urges begin soon after the moment of birth. We now know that many women have an orgasm at the moment the baby’s head begins to crown. While any woman who has given birth without sedation will tell you there is pain, women who are aware will tell you there is an enormous sense of release and pleasure.  Several European studies have gone on to document this with both birth mothers and midwifes.

To me, this means our first sexual experience, comes at the moment of our birth. We are psychically connected to our birth mother at those moments and for many months to come.  If our birth mother was joyous at our birth there will be a start of a joyful paradigm in our consciousness about creativity and sexuality.

At about 2 years old, little boys and girls, become very interested in the genitalia of each other and themselves. Boys notice circumcision and lack of it, girls often feel confused because they have no penis. If this exploration is discouraged and not discussed the child begins to build a negative idea about their sex assign identity.

Around 2 years transgender children will often begin having feelings of confusion about their gender. Parents who try to discourage the feelings and discussion of sexual identification by a child do more harm in suppressing the child and their sense of wholeness and health. Sexual curiosity, feelings, gender inquisitiveness are all a part of building a healthy ego. An ego, which is based on healthy insights into the working of our psyche.

My point with all of this is that gender and sexual assignment discussions are an important part of mental health and the well being of all children.  When a parent denies the feelings and need for discussion in these areas the child’s creativity is buried and becomes stagnant.

Understanding your feelings of gender are an important part of realizing your identity. Not because you must act in a certain way, but because if you understand your underlying feelings and identity, you free yourself from the boxes society has placed on us, labeling us binary and limiting our gender identity to male or female.

Carl Jung took Freud’s work on the importance of sexuality and gender in our life a step further.  He boldly stated that we are whole, and complete, both female and male genders.  He further went on to explore the idea that it takes both the male and female concepts for us to be creative. Creativity is defined as something like baking a cake, building a sand castle… or any other endeavor you might take.  Our gender identity, how we view our selves as a sexual creative being is at the very core of our spiritual identity.

 Our moment of orgasm no matter how it occurs is a moment of sacredness. It is that one time we are not limited to a preconceived idea about our self, our body, our identity and know we are one with the Universe, one with Truth and God.

Copyright 2016-2018 Suzanne Deakins

Sexual Fluidity, release date fall of 2018

The Prosperos’ classes Translation and Crown Mysteries address these issues and give you techniques to help you in your road to spiritual health.  Contact me at onespiritpress@gmai.com and visit us at www.onespiritpress.com

Bathtub Bulletin
Published on Jun 21, 2018
A long time ago a guy named Archimedes was taking a bath when all of a sudden he had a great insight. He jumped out of the bath and ran down the street yelling “Eureka! Eureka! I have found it!”

Welcome to the Bathtub Bulletin, a clearinghouse for insights, breakthroughs, metanoias and inspiration.

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The Shift Network
Uploaded on Jun 18, 2018

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

June 20, 2018

“If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve,” Debbie Millman counseled in one of the best commencement speeches ever given, urging: “Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities…” Far from Pollyanna platitude, this advice actually reflects what modern psychology knows about how belief systems about our own abilities and potential fuel our behavior and predict our success. Much of that understanding stems from the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, synthesized in her remarkably insightful Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (public library) — an inquiry into the power of our beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, and how changing even the simplest of them can have profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives.

One of the most basic beliefs we carry about ourselves, Dweck found in her research, has to do with how we view and inhabit what we consider to be our personality. A “fixed mindset” assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled. A “growth mindset,” on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities. Out of these two mindsets, which we manifest from a very early age, springs a great deal of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness.

The consequences of believing that intelligence and personality can be developed rather than being immutably engrained traits, Dweck found in her two decades of research with both children and adults, are remarkable. She writes:

For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value. How does this happen? How can a simple belief have the power to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life?

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.

[…]

I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves — in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser? . . .

There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.

At the heart of what makes the “growth mindset” so winsome, Dweck found, is that it creates a passion for learning rather than a hunger for approval. Its hallmark is the conviction that human qualities like intelligence and creativity, and even relational capacities like love and friendship, can be cultivated through effort and deliberate practice. Not only are people with this mindset not discouraged by failure, but they don’t actually see themselves as failing in those situations — they see themselves as learning. Dweck writes:

Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.

This idea, of course, isn’t new — if anything, it’s the fodder of self-help books and vacant “You can do anything!” platitudes. What makes Dweck’s work different, however, is that it is rooted in rigorous research on how the mind — especially the developing mind — works, identifying not only the core drivers of those mindsets but also how they can be reprogrammed.

Dweck and her team found that people with the fixed mindset see risk and effort as potential giveaways of their inadequacies, revealing that they come up short in some way. But the relationship between mindset and effort is a two-way street:

It’s not just that some people happen to recognize the value of challenging themselves and the importance of effort. Our research has shown that this comes directly from the growth mindset. When we teach people the growth mindset, with its focus on development, these ideas about challenge and effort follow. . . .

As you begin to understand the fixed and growth mindsets, you will see exactly how one thing leads to another—how a belief that your qualities are carved in stone leads to a host of thoughts and actions, and how a belief that your qualities can be cultivated leads to a host of different thoughts and actions, taking you down an entirely different road.

[…]

The mindsets change what people strive for and what they see as success. . . they change the definition, significance, and impact of failure. . . they change the deepest meaning of effort.

Dweck cites a poll of 143 creativity researchers, who concurred that the number-one trait underpinning creative achievement is precisely the kind of resilience and fail-forward perseverance attributed to the growth mindset. She writes:

When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world — the world of fixed traits — success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other — the world of changing qualities — it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.

In one world, failure is about having a setback. Getting a bad grade. Losing a tournament. Getting fired. Getting rejected. It means you’re not smart or talented. In the other world, failure is about not growing. Not reaching for the things you value. It means you’re not fulfilling your potential.

In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.

But her most remarkable research, which has informed present theories of why presence is more important than praise in teaching children to cultivate a healthy relationship with achievement, explores how these mindsets are born — they form, it turns out, very early in life. In one seminal study, Dweck and her colleagues offered four-year-olds a choice: They could either redo an easy jigsaw puzzle, or try a harder one. Even these young children conformed to the characteristics of one of the two mindsets — those with “fixed” mentality stayed on the safe side, choosing the easier puzzles that would affirm their existing ability, articulating to the researchers their belief that smart kids don’t make mistakes; those with the “growth” mindset thought it an odd choice to begin with, perplexed why anyone would want to do the same puzzle over and over if they aren’t learning anything new. In other words, the fixed-mindset kids wanted to make sure they succeeded in order to seem smart, whereas the growth-mindset ones wanted to stretch themselves, for their definition of success was about becoming smarter.

Dweck quotes one seventh-grade girl, who captured the difference beautifully:

I think intelligence is something you have to work for … it isn’t just given to you.… Most kids, if they’re not sure of an answer, will not raise their hand to answer the question. But what I usually do is raise my hand, because if I’m wrong, then my mistake will be corrected. Or I will raise my hand and say, ‘How would this be solved?’ or ‘I don’t get this. Can you help me?’ Just by doing that I’m increasing my intelligence.

Things got even more interesting when Dweck brought people into Columbia’s brain-wave lab to study how their brains behaved as they answered difficult questions and received feedback. What she found was that those with a fixed mindset were only interested in hearing feedback that reflected directly on their present ability, but tuned out information that could help them learn and improve. They even showed no interest in hearing the right answer when they had gotten a question wrong, because they had already filed it away in the failure category. Those with a growth mindset, on the other hand, were keenly attentive to information that could help them expand their existing knowledge and skill, regardless of whether they’d gotten the question right or wrong — in other words, their priority was learning, not the binary trap of success and failure.

These findings are especially important in education and how we, as a culture, assess intelligence. In another study of hundreds of students, mostly adolescents, Dweck and her colleagues gave each ten fairly challenging problems from a nonverbal IQ test, then praised the student for his or her performance — most had done pretty well. But they offered two types of praise: Some students were told “Wow, you got [X many] right. That’s a really good score. You must be smart at this,” while others, “Wow, you got [X many] right. That’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.” In other words, some were praised for ability and others for effort. The findings, at this point, are unsurprising yet jarring:

The ability praise pushed students right into the fixed mindset, and they showed all the signs of it, too: When we gave them a choice, they rejected a challenging new task that they could learn from. They didn’t want to do anything that could expose their flaws and call into question their talent.

[…]

In contrast, when students were praised for effort, 90 percent of them wanted the challenging new task that they could learn from.

The most interesting part, however, is what happened next: When Dweck and her colleagues gave the students a subsequent set of harder problems, on which the students didn’t do so well. Suddenly, the ability-praised kids thought they weren’t so smart or gifted after all. Dweck puts it poignantly:

If success had meant they were intelligent, then less-than-success meant they were deficient.

But for the effort-praised kids, the difficulty was simply an indication that they had to put in more effort, not a sign of failure or a reflection of their poor intellect. Perhaps most importantly, the two mindsets also impacted the kids’ level of enjoyment — everyone enjoyed the first round of easier questions, which most kids got right, but as soon as the questions got more challenging, the ability-praised kids no longer had any fun, while the effort-praised ones not only still enjoyed the problems but even said that the more challenging, the more fun. The latter also had significant improvements in their performance as the problems got harder, while the former kept getting worse and worse, as if discouraged by their own success-or-failure mindset.

It gets better — or worse, depending on how we look at it: The most unsettling finding came after the IQ questions were completed, when the researchers asked the kids to write private letters to their peers relaying the experience, including a space for reporting their scores on the problems. To Dweck’s devastation, the most toxic byproduct of the fixed mindset turned out to be dishonesty: Forty percent of the ability-praised kids lied about their scores, inflating them to look more successful. She laments:

In the fixed mindset, imperfections are shameful — especially if you’re talented — so they lied them away. What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.

This illustrates the key difference between the two mindsets — for those with a growth one, “personal success is when you work your hardest to become your best,” whereas for those with a fixed one, “success is about establishing their superiority, pure and simple. Being that somebody who is worthier than the nobodies.” For the latter, setbacks are a sentence and a label. For the former, they’re motivating, informative input — a wakeup call.

But one of the most profound applications of this insight has to do not with business or education but with love. Dweck found that people exhibited the same dichotomy of dispositions in their personal relationships: Those with a fixed mindset believed their ideal mate would put them on a pedestal and make them feel perfect, like “the god of a one-person religion,” whereas those with the growth mindset preferred a partner who would recognize their faults and lovingly help improve them, someone who would encourage them to learn new things and became a better person. The fixed mindset, it turns out, is at the root of many of our most toxic cultural myths about “true love.” Dweck writes:

The growth mindset says all of these things can be developed. All — you, your partner, and the relationship — are capable of growth and change.

In the fixed mindset, the ideal is instant, perfect, and perpetual compatibility. Like it was meant to be. Like riding off into the sunset. Like “they lived happily ever after.”

[…]

One problem is that people with the fixed mindset expect everything good to happen automatically. It’s not that the partners will work to help each other solve their problems or gain skills. It’s that this will magically occur through their love, sort of the way it happened to Sleeping Beauty, whose coma was cured by her prince’s kiss, or to Cinderella, whose miserable life was suddenly transformed by her prince.

This also applies to the myth of mind-reading, where the fixed mindset believes that an ideal couple should be able to read each other’s minds and finish each other’s sentences. She cites a study that invited people to talk about their relationships:

Those with the fixed mindset felt threatened and hostile after talking about even minor discrepancies in how they and their partner saw their relationship. Even a minor discrepancy threatened their belief that they shared all of each other’s views.

But most destructive of all relationship myths is the belief that if it requires work, something is terribly wrong and that any discrepancy of opinions or preferences is indicative of character flaws on behalf of one’s partner. Dweck offers a reality check:

Just as there are no great achievements without setbacks, there are no great relationships without conflicts and problems along the way.

When people with a fixed mindset talk about their conflicts, they assign blame. Sometimes they blame themselves, but often they blame their partner. And they assign blame to a trait — a character flaw.

But it doesn’t end there. When people blame their partner’s personality for the problem, they feel anger and disgust toward them.

And it barrels on: Since the problem comes from fixed traits, it can’t be solved. So once people with the fixed mindset see flaws in their partners, they become contemptuous of them and dissatisfied with the whole relationship.

Those with the growth mindset, on the other hand, can acknowledge their partners’ imperfections, without assigning blame, and still feel that they have a fulfilling relationship. They see conflicts as problems of communication, not of personality or character. This dynamic holds true as much in romantic partnerships as in friendship and even in people’s relationships with their parents. Dweck summarizes her findings:

When people embark on a relationship, they encounter a partner who is different from them, and they haven’t learned how to deal with the differences. In a good relationship, people develop these skills and, as they do, both partners grow and the relationship deepens. But for this to happen, people need to feel they’re on the same side. . . . As an atmosphere of trust developed, they [become] vitally interested in each other’s development.

What it all comes down to is that a mindset is an interpretative process that tells us what is going on around us. In the fixed mindset, that process is scored by an internal monologue of constant judging and evaluation, using every piece of information as evidence either for or against such assessments as whether you’re a good person, whether your partner is selfish, or whether you are better than the person next to you. In a growth mindset, on the other hand, the internal monologue is not one of judgment but one of voracious appetite for learning, constantly seeking out the kind of input that you can metabolize into learning and constructive action.

In the rest of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck goes on to explore how these fundamental mindsets form, what their defining characteristics are in different contexts of life, and how we can rewire our cognitive habits to adopt the much more fruitful and nourishing growth mindset.

Public domain photographs via Flickr Commons

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Green Book

German edition of The Green Book
Author	Muammar Gaddafi
Country	Libya
Language	Arabic
Subject	Political philosophy
Publication date	1975
Published in English	1976
Media type	Print
Pages	110

Burned-out The Green Book centre in Benghazi‘s downtown during the 2011 Libyan Civil War

Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
This article is part of a series on the politics and government of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi

The Green Book (Arabic: الكتاب الأخضر‎ al-Kitāb al-Aḫḍar) is a short book setting out the political philosophy of Libyandictator Muammar Gaddafi. The book was first published in 1975. It was “intended to be read for all people.”^[1] It is said to have been inspired in part by The Little Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao).^[2][3] Both were widely distributed both inside and outside their country of origin, and “written in a simple, understandable style with many memorable slogans.”^[4]An English translation was issued by the Libyan People’s Committee,^[5] and a bilingual English/Arabic edition was issued in London by Martin, Brian & O’Keeffe in 1976. During the Libyan Civil War, copies of the book were burned by anti-Gaddafi demonstrators.^[6]

Influence

In Libya

According to British author and former Greater London Council member George Tremlett, Libyan children spent two hours a week studying the book as part of their curriculum.^[7] Extracts were broadcast every day on television and radio.^[7] Its slogans were also found on billboards and painted on buildings in Libya.^[7]

International

By 1993 lectures and seminars on The Green Book had been held at universities and colleges in France, Eastern Europe, Colombia, and Venezuela.^[7]

Contents

The Green Book consists of three parts and has 110 pages.^[7]

• The Solution of the Problem of Democracy: The Authority of the People (published in late 1975)
• The Solution of the Economic Problem: Socialism (published in early 1977)
• The Social Basis of the Third International Theory (published in September 1981)

Views

The Green Book rejects both capitalism and communism, as well as representative democracy. Instead, it proposes a type of direct democracy overseen by the General People’s Committee which allows direct political participation for all adult citizens.^[7][8]

The book states that “Freedom of expression is the natural right of every person, even if they choose to behave irrationally, to express his or her insanity.”^[9] The Green Book states that freedom of speech is based upon public ownership of book publishers, newspapers, television, and radio stations, on the grounds that private ownership would be undemocratic.^[7]

A paragraph in the book about abolishing money is similar to a paragraph in Frederick Engels‘ “Principles of Communism”.^[10]Gaddafi wrote: “The final step is when the new socialist society reaches the stage where profit and money disappear. “It is through transforming society into a fully productive society, and through reaching in production a level where the material needs of the members of society are satisfied. On that final stage, profit will automatically disappear and there will be no need for money.”^[11]

Criticism

The examples and perspective in this section deal primarily with US and European academics and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. You may improve this article, discuss the issue on the talk page, or create a new article, as appropriate. (May 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

George Tremlett has called the resulting media dull and lacking in a clash of ideas.^[7] Dartmouth College Professor Dirk Vandewalle describes the book as more a collection of aphorisms rather than a systematic argument.^[1] U.S. Ambassador David Mack called the book quite jumbled, with various ideas including “a fair amount of xenophobia” wrapped up in “strange mixture”.^[12]

Writing for the British Broadcasting Corporation, the journalist Martin Asser described the book as follows: “The theory claims to solve the contradictions inherent in capitalism and communism… In fact, it is little more than a series of fatuous diatribes, and it is bitterly ironic that a text whose professed objective is to break the shackles… has been used instead to subjugate an entire population.”^[9]

The book caused a scandal in 1987, when West German ice hockey club ECD Iserlohn, led by Heinz Weifenbach, signed a US$900,000 advertising deal for the book.^[13]

More at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Book_(Muammar_Gaddafi)