Michael Lipson, PhD is a clinical psychologist, author and translator living in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He is the author of, most recently, Be: An Alphabet of Astonishment, Stairway of Surprise: Six Steps to a Creative Life, and Group Meditation.
Michael, thank you very much for accepting my invitation to this interview.
Thank you for inviting me. It's a luxury to be invited.
So I start, I don't think you know this, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who lives in Hudson. She's an oral historian. She helps people tell their story. It's a big, beautiful question, which is why I steal it, but I also overexplain it because it's so big. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in absolute control and you can answer or not answer this question any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?
Absolute control, what would I do with that? Go ahead, what's your question?
The question is, where do you come from?
Ah, well, that's a very Zen master kind of question. They often said that, trying to plumb the depths of where the other monk, for instance, was coming from, not geographically or biographically, but sort of from their spiritual source.
I don't know if you ever read "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler." Well, of course I did. And in there, there's a little boy who's hiding in the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan from the guards and the boy and a girl. And at one point, the boy is hiding. He's standing, I think, on a closed toilet. But the guard opens the stall and sees him and says, "Where did you come from?" And he says, "My mommy always says I come from heaven." And then he runs away.
So I guess that's where I come from, just like you and everybody else.
Where do I come from? Sure, I could just answer that in so many ways. To be more down to earth, I was born towards the end of the 50s, a baby boomer in New Haven, Connecticut. My father was a professor at Yale, which certainly had a big effect on me, not only because my mother also was a professor more briefly. And at UConn, she got her doctorate in American history. My father's field was law, in particular, international and Soviet law.
It had a big effect on me because of a kind of a reading, academic orientation, fundamentally, and the people we knew and so forth. But also because though I was Jewish and raised in an agnostic background, my dad, to a lesser extent, my mom, but definitely my dad had an early interest in Zen Buddhism. That was like an academic, fashionable, almost intellectual thing. Back in the day, he wasn't a sitter in meditation or an attender of workshops and so forth, but he was a reader and thinker. So, I grew up hearing stories of the Zen masters and the wonderful old Hasidic rabbis, sort of as if they were all one group of fascinating people. And I think that had an effect on my siblings too, but it took a little more in me.
So, I think that early wondering about the nature of the mind, the nature of our project of being here, what this is, the Zen people talk about the great matter of life and death. I would say also the fact it's a spiritual kind of a background or, I don't know, psychological background that's very fundamental is that my parents' first child died when he was just three months old in a car crash. And so, my parents were driving. My mother was holding the baby on her lap. This was before car seats. And my dad swerved to avoid a dog in the road. The car hit a soft shoulder, flipped over. My mother fell on her firstborn child and killed it, as she said, with her weight. So, that was a kind of untalkable about thing, you know, and a grief that I think pervaded my family when I was growing up. And one of those things that's an open secret, where to some degree people know about it, but it can't be talked about. And I think that had an effect on all of us, sort of making us have some kind of relationship, mostly not a cheerful relationship, to the great matter of life and death. All those are ways I could answer the question, where do I come from?
Yeah. You said that it kind of, the Zen, the masters took with you, more so with your siblings. Can you tell me a story about that?
Well, like the kinds of stories I would hear from my dad? Or what makes you say that? Is there a moment where you realized that it had took, I guess I love that word, that it struck you differently than your siblings?
Well, not a moment, but for instance, I doubt my brother and sister did what I did when I was seven. I remember sitting on the stairs in my home, in our house, and really trying to penetrate the question of mu, which is a Zen koan, a kind of early koan in a series of koans. And it just means nothing in Japanese. And I remember thinking, how can I have it in my mind? How can I focus on it if it's nothing? If it's nothing, there can't be anything to get about it. So I just had an affinity for these kind of puzzles.
And do you have a recollection of knowing what you wanted to be when you grew up? What did you want to be?
Oh, sure. I wanted to be lots of things. But they weren't a psychologist who writes books on spirituality. They were, I wanted to be, gosh, well, I wanted to be Sir Galahad who occupies the perilous, you know, around the round table in the Arthurian legends. And I wanted to be a cowboy. And what else did I want to be growing up? I wanted to be a poet from very early on. And I wrote poetry into my 20s. Byron said, to be 20 and a poet is to be 20. To be 40 and a poet is to be a poet. By the time I was 40, I was no longer a poet. So he was right about me, he nailed me hundreds of years before I was born.
You described yourself as a boomer. Does that word or idea mean anything to you?
Yeah. Well, sure. I mean, it's got a pejorative slant since people started saying, "Okay, boomer." But it was, sure, it's, I recognize as a grown up, how insanely privileged we were, growing in a time after the Second World War, where America was increasingly wealthy, increasingly, you know, hugely respected. And it was, you know, as a white, upper middle class American, I was just in an incredibly privileged position, male, which I certainly didn't appreciate at the time. But now I see sort of what this amazing, you know, kind of bolus of a generation, enjoying an unprecedented, and probably never to be repeated standard of living was. So, and then, you know, realizing my cohort is aging and dying, that's, now that certainly is something. And feeling that we were sort of central to the universe, and now no longer. So, that's an interesting trajectory that a lot of people in that cohort are going through.
Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you do now?
Sure. Yeah, I live in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. I've been here many years now. And in full time private practice. Since COVID, a little bit before COVID, I no longer see clients in my office sitting down. I much prefer and insist on seeing them walking in mostly in the woods or talking on the phone while I'm walking. So, all seasons, all weathers, some people want to accompany me, about half my clientele accompanies me, and the others, it's phone or Zoom, but I don't like Zoom. It's better for me to stay awake, to walk in the woods. It's better for my, I have, you know, spinal issues. But also, it's a big revolution in how it feels to be with people.
I guess I've always had a kind of democratic, small D and big D tendency. So, there's something very equalizing about negotiating the same fallen log together, or the rain together, helping each other out through going through a puddle or dealing with bug spray and ticks and mosquitoes. You know, you just, it has an equalizing, democratizing quality. And then, too, there's a kind of third interlocutor, which is the surround. Coming up through a psychoanalytic and also, to some degree, family therapy and cognitive behavioral graduate program, nobody ever mentioned the physical surround. It just wasn't, it was just all about people's habits and thoughts and feelings and history. But it wasn't. You're actually somewhere on a planet, in a man-made surround, or out in the woods, as I am now.
And to actually realize that there's no such thing as a human just floating in space. There's a human with, of course, a history, that's a kind of a surround or environment, and a human kind of biosphere, the people you're connected to professionally or through family or friends and lovers and so forth. But there's also the material world that we're part of and embedded in and surrounded by, whether you think of that as an animal world or a biosphere altogether, or everything else, the mineral world, world of air and earth and water. And of course, our so-called man-made surround, if we're in a building, there's wood and metal and plastic and paint, all those things are also nature, just transformed by us. It's almost as if we see them as something utterly different from a tree or a rock or a river or a donkey. Well, they're very different, and we've transformed them and denatured them to hugely, so they're not recognizable, but we got it all from the earth. It's all earth.
If you look at a, I don't know, a computer, every single thing is mined from the earth and then hugely transformed by human intervention, but it's all earth and we can have a relationship to it. That relationship is psychological, but also energetic. Now we're getting into a more mystical or magical or wondrous thing, but one of my many trainings was in kind of energy medicine or energy relationships. That's a California thing from back in the 80s. But that's a very real part of my life and I think everyone's life and part of our connectedness with the world.
You mentioned that it was COVID that sort of shifted the way you are with your clients. I just had a conversation with somebody who was talking about their experience in psychoanalysis, sitting on the couch, lying on the couch with the therapist behind them, like a New Yorker cartoon. It's not something I've ever experienced. I didn't know that it was still going on. But how big a shift is it, what you're doing, and how did COVID bring it about?
Well, it's a huge shift that does exist, but it's not very common. The old style New Yorker cartoon set up, which was Freud's set up, which by the way, comes from Anton Mesmer. Mesmer had people lying down, hypnotism, hypnos, that's sleep. Hypnotism was thought of, mesmerism, hypnotism was thought of as a kind of sleep. So you would lie down and then you would get suggestions. Actually, Freud was no good as a hypnotist, which it's very well known, it's part of the literature. He was bad at hypnotism, and he ended up inventing psychoanalysis, or actually a patient of his, Anna von Oh, who we now know was, that was her, the name he gave her for confidentiality's sake. Actually, we now know it was Bertha von Pappenheim, who turned out to be a brilliant woman and is really the founder of modern social work.
And she said to, actually, she was a patient of both Breuer and Freud's studies in hysteria, 1899. Joseph Breuer was a colleague, another neurologist and colleague of Freud's, and she was his patient originally. She told him, please shut up and listen. He was telling her what to do, telling her what she thought, telling her what the source was. She had some very odd kind of symptoms. And she said, you know, I think it would go better if you just shut up and let me talk, I mean, in the language of the day. And he was wise enough to do that. And then she started talking and things started to go better. So the whole idea of the blank screen analyst and so forth, comes from a woman. Now I mentioned that because, and then credit went to Freud and Breuer.
But I mentioned that because actually, it was many years before COVID. I had a patient and a middle aged woman who, I don't think it's right for me to say her name, even though she's long dead. And she had terminal ovarian cancer. But she was told by her doctor, you've got three months to live. And she said to me, "Michael, I'll pay you for your whole morning. I want to climb Monument Mountain, largest mountain in Great Barrington." It's only, I don't know, 2000 feet high. And she said, "I want to climb Mountain with you. This is before cell phones. And when we get back down, I want you to call Dr. Johnson and tell him she's not dead yet. She doesn't look like she's about to die," which I did. And she was very happy with that. It took us a long time to climb because she was already in pain and not doing well. But she ended up living another five years. So she was quite right.
Anyway, that got me out of the office, if you see what I mean. And I had one other episode like that long before COVID, where I saw a little boy in therapy. And it was a terrible first session, really. After the session, his mother said to me, "How did that go?" I said, "Well, it wasn't very forthcoming." And she said, "You know, if you walked in the woods with him, I bet he'd be more voluble." So the clinic that I was in then was right, there were some woods right behind it. There was a little river, a little stream with rocks in it. So next time he came, he and I crossed the stepping stones across this stream. And we went into the woods where no path, we just went into the woods behind it. You'd never do that now without permissions and so forth. And as soon as we crossed the stream, and we're in the uncharted woods, his gait changed, his kind of face changed, and he started talking about all kinds of things. So she was right, the mother.
But that also got me out of the office. So then when COVID came, and we had to have, you know, six feet or more distance, and you're supposed to be outside, or many of us bought special air purifiers for our offices, which I still have also. But then I arranged with some people to go outdoors and meet them. Even then, I remember being anxious and wanting to walk sort of at a distance from people. That was before the vaccine and everything. So then I felt like, oh, this is kind of great. This has a lot of different qualities, this walking, sometimes on city streets, but mostly in the woods, with patients. And so then I gradually decided this should be a full time thing. And I'm sick of sitting in the office, which I did for 30 years before that. So it's okay to go through a change.
How did you get into the work that you're doing? When did you realize that you would make a living doing this kind of work?
Oh, well, it was a tortuous long process. So I have a lot of sympathy for young people who go through a lot of torture finding their way in life. Let me see. Well, as I said, I was raised in an academic family, and I was good at things like analysis of literature. And in the fullness of time, actually my undergraduate major was German literature. And I read German literature, because I was interested in the poet Rilke and in the works of Rudolf Steiner, who I'd run into also. I wanted to read Steiner in the original and Rilke's way better in the original. So and then I eventually, in the fullness of time, was at Yale in a doctoral program in comparative literature, with German, French and English being my languages.
But, you know, things I had seen before, like working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, it was just so dusty and empty to be in these theories. It just didn't cut it for me anymore. And I'd grown up with it. It was really like I'd already done it. It wasn't news to me. And I felt dead. And I had some prophetic dreams or suggestive dreams and so forth. And it was really hard to leave because being at Yale incomplete, my whole academic career was assured, you know, and it was very hard for me to leave. But I was in my late 20s at that point. And I, but I quit after a year and floundered for a while. I didn't know what kind of, I wanted to do something helpful to the world. So eventually I got a doctorate in clinical psych.
But I think that one thing that made it impossible for me to stay as an academic was my time in Calcutta, although it was brief. But after graduating from college, I got a fellowship, the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard. And they, my project was to go live with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, which I did. Not with her because it's a very, it's a very gender segregated organization, still very traditional. So I lived in a novitiate house with some brothers, some of the missionary brothers of charity, and worked in Kalighat, the home for dying destitutes. So we scraped up these dying people from the streets and I turned TB positive there and was exposed to a whole bunch of diseases and got very, very sick with dysentery. But of course, none of that was really anything compared with the incredible depths of disease, poverty, suffering, abuse that you see there. I won't go into that in detail, but you see a lot of distressing things there. I was also somewhat distressed and confused by the whole way the Catholic church and Mother Teresa had of treating people or ministering to people. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic experience, a big education for a white kid from America.
I mean, to the best of your ability, what was that experience like? I mean, my first, I've been to India and my first experience was on the streets of Calcutta. Nothing like what you're talking about, but just the mere exposure to the streets of Calcutta was enough to just blow my mind really wide open as to just how different life is out there in the world. I don't even know how to talk about it really, but what was your experience? How did you come back changed from that time?
Well, I just felt the absurd luxury of our world here. That changed me. But also I'd been kind of blasted open by the amount of love and compassion that was there in the missionaries of charity sort of in spite of everything. It's not like I believed in the Catholic doctrine, but they were doing something just amazing and trying to help people in their way. And, oh gosh, I remember one of my first days there, there was a guy coughing into a little clay cup. He had tuberculosis and he's spitting blood and he was gesturing, of course, I didn't speak any Bengali. He's gesturing to me. He wanted to be shaved. Now he was kachaksek, emaciated, covered with sores, dying of tuberculosis, but he wanted to be shaved.
So they gave me a straight, I mean, not a straight razor, an old fashioned safety razor, which as you know, isn't very safe. And there was no shaving cream or soap. They gave me a little thing of water and this terribly dangerous, dull, safe, quote unquote, safety razor. And I had a little shard of mirror. There was just a broken shard of mirror. And I shaved him and with every stroke, the blood would come because his skin was just paper thin. But I showed him as I was going, both the blood and the fact that some of the beard had come off and he was so delighted and was going, come on, keep going, keep going. So I shaved him in this frightening way. And then he died that night. Next day when I was there, he was dead. He was gone.
So those kinds of experiences, seeing people with, you know, missing limbs and I went to a clinic for people with leprosy and just alarming things. So it changes your sense of what is this world that is presented to us in such a sanitized way through our media and our direct experience here. A lot of white, relatively well-off people, well, a lot of people of all colors and genders and nationalities, but people who are relatively well-off in America never experienced the pervasive poverty, disease and so forth that you see in other countries. At the same time, I have to say there's a level of connection among people that far exceeds our loneliness. So those kind of cross-cultural, what we now, people are familiar, I suppose, with that idea. I certainly confirmed that.
Which idea?
The idea that we have no idea how privileged we are. And that can be told you. I grew up hearing about the starving kids in Africa, so we should finish our food. But you can be told you, but of course, going and experiencing anything makes a world of difference. Same with spiritual practices and realities. You can hear about them, you go, oh, this sounds pretty, or this is nice, or whatever, nice theory. But when you experience anything, it changes you.
Yeah. I feel like I remember a conversation with you where we shared this song, "Do You Realize?" Is it The Flaming Lips?
Yeah. The Flaming Lips, yes. It's wonderful.
This amazing song because it captures this kind of feeling. You've got two books, right? One is "Stairway of Surprise." And the other one is this "Alphabet of Astonishment." And I guess I wanted to ask you about what makes those things so important, surprise and astonishment and realization, I guess. What's your attraction to those ideas? And what have you learned about them?
Yeah, thank you for pointing out. The "Stairway of Surprise," and it's actually called "BE," B-E colon, "An Alphabet of Astonishment." But yeah, surprise and astonishment are in both those titles. I do have a third, "Group Meditation" about a kind of a technology of spiritual experience in a group. But what's so important about surprise or astonishment, or I could mention a bunch of other things that are kind of in the same family, like curiosity, or wonder, or gratitude. These are all qualities that open your mind, that soften the edges of what you think you know, that make you available to new understanding.
The Zen, the Korean Zen master, Seung Sahn, who died, I don't know, 10 years ago or so. He had a lifetime slogan, "Only don't know." He didn't really quite mean only don't know. He meant don't know the way you already know. Don't know. Drop everything you think you know to, of course, have new kinds of experience that don't necessarily grasp anything. It's the difference between, if I reach into a river, let's say I want to get some of the water in the river, I want to know what the river's about. If I reach into the river and grasp with my hand and pull away, I have very little water in my hand. But if I reach my hand in and leave it in the river, I have the whole river.
Qualities like astonishment, wonder, surprise, curiosity, gratitude, you can wash yourself through with the quality of innocence. Not that you've never done anything wrong, but it's a state or quality of mind, of innocence. Those things open us. They're like, another Zen teacher refers to opening the palm of the mind. Opening the palm of the mind instead of grasping and quote unquote, having some understanding or some knowledge. Opening the palm of the mind.
These are all ways, these words are just cues to the tip of the iceberg of various practices that return us to a state of cognitive non-grasping by which all kinds of interesting things come your way. William Blake, the 19th century, well, late 18th and early 19th century English poet has a phrase, "He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise."
So no binding to yourself, but kissing or appreciating it, gratitude, wonder, awe as it goes past. So flying or flowing, either way, not something to hold. So we need to train our minds away from getting the right answer, having the right doctrine, thinking we understand, train our minds to an openness that can bring us into greater intimacy with the universe. That takes various kinds of spiritual practice. So meditation, that there are many, many kinds of meditation, but there are many other things of the spiritual practices that don't quite, aren't meditation, but they're also restructuring how we know, how we live, opening our hearts to compassion for other people.
I think the time in Calcutta, which probably I was oriented that way because of my family's deep history with a death that couldn't be faced. I think it furthered my amazement at the fact that we do exist and we are alive for a while. And sharpen the question, what do you want to do? As Mary Oliver says, what do you want to do with your one wild and precious life? Sharpen that question. So it winkled me out of the academic career and into a career of helping people. You can't do that as an academic. I think I could have stayed. It would have been fine. There are plenty of wonderful professors who do wonderful, amazing things for people. So I'm not saying it was necessary.
I'm curious about the role of literature. You're always, you always have a quote. You always ground everything in language or literature or poetry. It's always really amazing. You say you started with Rilke. I have this real attraction to sort of the German idealism and Goethe. What is it about Rilke and Steiner and the German imagination that's so powerful?
They're all unique. I'm not sure I've ever grouped it really into thinking, I don't know, the German mind or something is so wonderful. But it's true that idealism and a lot of important authors came about and the romanticism really started in Germany and so on. I'm not sure why that would be Rilke.
You're a romantic or an idealist?
I think they were onto important things. People like Novalis, also Friedrich von Hardenberg, younger contemporary of Goethe's. Of course, Heidegger has the kind of flowering of the German Seinsphilosophie, or being philosophy. I'm not quite sure how I got led there originally, as I think about it. How did I first hear about Rilke? Or why did I decide to major in German? There were a lot of factors behind it. My dad, again, was a big lodestar for me. He was a huge quoter of poetry. He knew French, Italian, German, Russian very fluently. And so I started memorizing poetry when I was very young. Poetry and to some degree, passages like speeches like the Gettysburg Address or things like that. I enjoyed memorizing.
And I think memorization for me as a kid, and even today, it's kind of taking a break from your own mind. It's like I have this, the repetitive worries, or just repetition altogether of your own thoughts, isn't as interesting as repeating very beautiful, elevating, suggestive, intriguing, challenging thoughts of others. So hopping out of my own mind into the minds of others. And then I guess, yeah, it really has to do with the beauty of the language, whether it's Rilke's writing or English-American poetry.
What do you love about Rilke?
Oh, sorry. Well, Rilke knew everything. He just knew everything. Now, Rilke, mind you, I read a wonderful takedown biography of Rilke and what an asshole he was in interpersonal. I'm not sure he's my favorite person, but in terms of his poetry, he got himself into a good state to write his poetry. And he understood, you feel that he understands the inside of the world. It's like this whole world, our thoughts, our feelings, the physical world we see is kind of like a result, a clunky result. It's like the ice cube that forms, but the fluid river that coalesced into these fixed forms of thought, feeling, perception, memory, everything. You feel that Rilke's in the living stream before it coalesces and dies into the everyday world. And his poetry kind of teases you backward and upward, which, by the way, is a famous trope inside of Zen also, is to take what they call the backward step.
That's why that question, where do you come from, your first question, where did this thought come from? It doesn't belong to any particular person. I remember there's a Quaker story that some early Quakers were sitting with their Native American friends. They invited a Native American elder from somewhere around here, the Mashapauga, one of the East Coast tribes. And after a silent hour, the elders, the tribal elders said to the Quaker elder, it's so good to spend some time in the place where words come from. So one feels that Rilke and the great poets altogether are teasing us back to the sources which are actually livelier than the results, the processes livelier than the results. We're familiar with that idea.
Yeah. So I shared with you just a little while ago, because it crossed my path that Pope Francis had written this thing about the role of literature and formation. And I just wondered if you had a chance to think about it, what your thoughts might be. He wrote this, I mean, I guess he writes these papal letters all the time, but I don't, of course, I'm not always paying attention to them, but this one crossed my path through the Chronicle of Higher Education, because they were saying, can the Pope save the humanities? Because he'd written this letter about the benefits of literature and formation, which I think is the technical term for the development of a person in the church. But he says in the first paragraph, this is open for everybody. And one of the first benefits he sort of points out of literature is just this idea of empathy. And I guess I'm curious to hear you talk about, we talked about wonder and all that other stuff, but empathy, and you spent all this time listening and being with people. Maybe you're not listening. I don't know how you describe what you do when you're with patients, but how do you think about empathy and what's happening when one does empathize with another person?
Yeah, I think literature opens our minds and our hearts to not just the human condition or our own condition, but other people's conditions. And one of the key things for meaningful empathy, compassion, treatment, etc., is to let the other person be other. That is not to assume that what they feel, what they suffer is just what you feel. So you can empathize, you can sympathize. I think literature, biography too, certainly helps us to imagine minds and lives and sufferings and joys for that matter, other than the ones we already know.
Montaigne had a slogan, that he had written over one of the beams in his office, Michel de Montaigne, meaning nothing human is alien to me. So he too was interested. He would read about cannibals, you know, was a new thing in the 17th century, learning about cannibals in remote areas in South America. And he wanted to feel, you know, I can imagine that. So he wasn't pretending he was that, or he already had done that. He was interested precisely in the new and yet feeling, even though it's alien, it's not alien, even anything human, I can somehow embrace, have empathy for. Let it be other and then let it not be other. That's empathy.
Simone Weil, W-E-I-L, who I mentioned extensively in the book, "Be an Alphabet of Astonishment," she died in 1943, a brilliant student at the Sorbonne. She wrote a wonderful little essay, a classic of 20th century spirituality called "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God." So that may be whispering in the Pope's ear still, but the right use of school studies with a view to the love of God and what she says. And by the way, she ends the essay on the topic of compassion, because she says the real reason we learn things in school is not to have the content, but to learn to pay attention. And that comes to its highest form in prayer and in empathy, compassion for other people.
So only someone capable of attention, she says, is capable of really helping another, being oriented towards another. So there we have prayer and meditation, how properly they develop a meaningful kind of selflessness, not as a mask or a principle, but as an actual orientation of the mind that can empty itself of itself and be open to the other. School studies, literature, imagination can be helps towards that end.
I'm curious about your take on sort of the current state of things, I guess, you know what I mean? That we've only got a couple of minutes left, right? But you spent a lot of time with people. You're talking about attention. My mentor would say that we consume the thing that we're afraid we're losing. And that I feel like everywhere I go, people are talking about mindfulness or the attention economy that we're very, very focused on our attention right now. How do you think about what it means to try to be astonished or surprised or curious or open in 2025 when our attention is so occupied?
Well, yeah, attention, like every other word can mean, can be a slogan that means so many different things. But what's rarely talked about is the deepening or the intensification of any of these capacities. They can all be infinitely deepened. So the attention economy and so forth, that has to do with an attention deficit disorder. That has to do with our attention being ripped around by a million things, social media and everything. And people are coming through that to realize the importance of where we put our minds intentionally or unintentionally.
But rarely is it spoken about that the attention can be deepened, the consciousness can be deepened, intensified intentionally. There is a, in the Frick Museum in New York City, there's a picture, I don't know who it's by, a medieval picture of Saint Jerome. And the title is "Saint Jerome Reading." So he's obviously reading the Bible or some holy scripture. And so the book is in his hand, he's holding the book, but he's looking up in a way and says he's reading. He's not looking at the book because what he's doing is he's taken something from the book, he's read a passage or a sentence, and now he's letting it sink in deeper.
Now he's working with it before he goes on rushing through to finish or jumping up to do something else or checking his iPhone. He's staying with what he's already read and deepening his sense of its validity, its reach, its life. So our staying with things and our letting the world and our own minds grow in intimacy and significance, that's more rarely talked about. That's not what we mostly mean when we talk about attentional problems or the attention economy or thieves of our attention these days. It's related, but it's only at one level.
Beautiful. Michael, thank you so much. We're kind of at the end of time, but I really appreciate you joining me. Thank you.
Thank you. I really appreciate your questioning and your receptive silence that invited me in. All right, take care. Be well.
Michael Lipson on Astonishment & Surprise