A conversation with my father of blessed memory

hi this is Rabbi shaab this morning I just got up from Shiva the traditional 7-Day morning period after the passing of my father I have a video that I made December 2021 so exactly 3 years ago of my father and I In This Very Room the soulwords podcast Studio having a conversation and I never released it to the public but I just spoke to my mother may she be well and asked her if she felt it was an appropriate thing to release it she said yes and so I'm going to share with you this conversation I had with My Father which gives you a glimpse into who he was and his personality and his areas of interest it's a very precious video because he's already he was 90 when he passed away so he would have been around 87 close to 88 when he recorded this conversation so you get the full age and wisdom of my father but this video is recorded before any cognitive issues that he may have struggled with in the very last days so you really get his full personality and I hope that it will be meaningful to you and those of you who know me and follow my work will surely have Insight when you see my father and realize how much of him is is is in me okay here here's the conversation hi how you doing hello okay good how are you hasem very okay okay can you tell us the story of the luer color test the lucer color test yeah which story do you want to know about that you want to know about the my classic story about uh that's not red that's not red yeah that's the story I want to know okay this was in the 60s and uh they were doing the uh new schools exchange a newsletter and uh open schools and all all that kind of stuff and we're trying out very new kinds of learning ways of teaching and learning and I decided to run my class that way a college class it was a community college so one of the activities I was doing I was having the uh students group uh Forum groups and um do uh various kinds of activities one of them was color test and there were different kinds of um tests and uh psychological this was a course in Psychology intro to psych yeah and um it's a personality test and this was a personality test but there were different kinds of psychological tests people were doing right and talking about and you know as a group so the Lucia color test it was uh like seven colors I believe it seven or eight uh sort of like that and um you rank these colors and they're like paint chips right like you go to the hardware store and you yeah it's like you look at the uh open the book uh for the samples right and uh all these colors are there yeah and you pick your color that you like the best put that at the top then rank them on all the way down the next in order of how much you you prefer them yes yeah so everything was going fine I was dividing them into groups I was walking around uh looking supervising the various groups and everything was going good and uh this reminds me of another test uhh story uh I'm going to ask you about the late the story later about I almost drove my car into a tree oh okay but that's when you were a student but tell us about the Lucia color the Lucia color test right so uh all of a sudden I hear uh row they're having a big not only a discussion but it's an argument and loud voices and people moving around and I I come over to it it was a Lucia color test people I said what's the matter what's going on each group was doing different tests yeah each group was doing different tests so the group that was doing the Luccia color test was fighting yeah everybody else was going along doing their thing okay and they were happy and everything's going well it should should be and their grades were uh based on this on doing these uh activities more than taking uh a uh question and answer or multiple choice or a true or false test uh it was experiential so but the experience was going ay here and I didn't know what it was and I went over to him and one woman stepped forward and she said it's me I'm the one I'm sorry and she was an older woman maybe in her 60s 50 late 50s 60s everybody else there was like out of high school they were all young and um she admitted that it was her and I said well what's the matter and I drew her aside and we talked and I said um what's the matter and she said um well you want us to sort these colors and in um terms of choice of what what we like well I like red and she picked up the uh what what these Colors by the way were not primary colors they were a little off off red off blue off yellow you know they were a little off but I said it doesn't matter whether it's red or not is whether you like it or not how you respond to that color color that's on the page yeah it doesn't matter I like red cuz like my favorite color is red okay the name of the color doesn't matter you don't even have to name it you just look at it and say I like this and this is the best and then this is second and I don't like this at all right goes on the bottom so whatever you want to do said I but I can't do it she said I like red and this is not red she kept saying that I said where do you you were do you have a job and she said yes day job yes uh work in an office I said do you get along with everybody very well and she said uh no I I have some issues with people and they weren't saying issues yet they were saying problems and then the culture changed into uh one of uh political correctness you couldn't you couldn't say a problem anymore nobody had problems they just had issues but this was before that she had a problem so she said I had problems at work too and I said well here's what I think um do you know about uh General semantics have you heard of that General semantics General semantics by a man named corsky was an engineer who came from I I didn't tell her all that I said you do you know about this uh General semantics and there was a uh it was very well known because there was a Senator SI hayakawa MH was a professor in California University uh who wrote a book about General semantics he was a general semanticist so there were it was a very legitimate um College course in uh field of study but the man who invented it uh was a um an engineer he was from Lithuania or some country some form country and um he uh I have your Polish American originator Alfred cor corsky corsky yeah corsky corsky yes corsky he was the creator of this school of thought and it was very became very popular as I said we had a man who later became Senator and wrote a book about it I saw haawa and there were other people that you know of note that were so you told this lady let's get back to the story so the lady who's having a dilemma about choosing the color in the lucier color test because she wanted to choose the red because she'd always liked red yes but she couldn't identify with that particular red and you were tell her will just choose not red I can't choose it I can't I said well you don't have to choose it maybe you don't want to no I can't make a decision on it's not so you told her about General semantics from csky yeah and you told her what so I told her uh go look him up look it up yeah uh find the most readable and why did you think that was helpful well because um she had a difficulty in G General semantics that's what I had diagnosed her I hadn't told her that but I but I had diagnosed her as a um literalist I don't even call him that concrete thinker uh I don't I don't have a for it I just say somebody who um does not get it as far as some many they think um that everything a word is the thing right that's the problem you grow up thinking you learn that as a child that word is that thing that red is red that's what red is that's red right so anything else you show me this reddish color it's not red so you know it's a different thing not the thing that uh you know it's supposed to be and this supposed to be readed and it's not so that's the problem so I realized that that's why I asked her if she had problems at work because this is going to spill over into everyday uh interactions and you're going to have trouble understanding people they're going to have trouble understanding you because your whole problem is is understanding like would you like pizza for lunch well it's 2:00 it's not lunch anymore yeah but I asked you if I really want to know if you want pizza it's not as I don't care if it's lunch it's not as much literalist literalism as it is you want to have pizza um well you you could do you could go with a lunch a literal uh thing but uh the word Pizza itself would would throw her right and and if you that's dish pizza that's not pizza yeah that deep dish pizza is not pizza that's why it's called deep dish right right right you ask me if I want pizza that's not pizza that's so you can see the kinds of arguments you can be in getting into yeah just over everyday things at work and um just socially every way so she did that she went and uh and studied uh the uh and changed her life and she' stopped stopped getting to fight she started changing her dress she had a kind of a school mm uh uh attire when she was uh wow it sounds like a movie it was like sort of like a movie you're not making this up no she she had uh gray hair and she had it back in a bun you know and she she was uh she changed her whole Persona after Shear now she came to class with her hair down and she had on snapy her clothes and um she changed her whole life do you know why I often tell the lucer color test story why because when I'm teaching spiritual Concepts a lot of times people concretize the terminology uh there's a lot of hidic terminology that describes various levels of Worlds or various levels of the Soul right and when people have seen those terms Ed used in a context in One Source they get very fixated on that being the way that term should be used all the time as you see by the way as you know this is a very common uh dilemma that people go through a lot of people grow up become adults and maybe live their whole life uh that way without having that corrected where they they have this uh Mis uh uh appropriate ation a misnomer a Mis uh calculation misperception of anyway of what things are because they learned that it was associated with the word the word was that thing and it may have been correct in that immediate context yes but then yes they are caught off guard when they're confronted with that same word in a different context yeah like if you're a little seven-year-old and you hear a four-year-old old 5-year-old you hear the teacher holds up an apple and said this is red right so the the classic example where people will get in my line of work where people get tripped up is Tanya behind you is the map of Tanya oh yeah so in Tanya one of the main points is that there arees which means garments of the Soul and those are the behaviors which you can control through exercising free choice and then there's the the Soul's capacities cognitive capacities and emotional capacities which are hardwired and they're much harder to control by Free Will So Tan say to focus on the former not the latter at any rate at one point it uses a term it says that the the cognition And the emotions of the Soul being the M the essence of the soul are beyond our access to change at will at least directly um but elsewhere and this from the AL himself in he says that the soul is uh simple uh reflective of the simple Oneness of God and it has no form or description not even the form or description of the cognitive or emotional faculties and he says in this that I said said that the essence of the soul in Tanya I said that the essence of the soul is its cognitive and emotional capacities that was a relative term in the context of a book that was about distinguishing between the inner soul which you can't control and the outer expressions of the Soul which you can control but if we're talking here in t more on a on a theoretical level then we have to say that no what we were calling the essence of the soul in Tanya is not really the essence it's more of an outer expression but relative to the Outer Outer expression of behaviors then we called it the the essence yes yeah and this is a also the characteristic of people who have difficulty with this issue of um General semantics is that they um do not understand uh deep things or uh the more more um abstract abstract Yeah the more abstract something is uh the harder it is for them some people have a lot of trouble with abstract terms yeah abstraction itself yeah I often point out that morality itself is an abstraction yes because if you really want to think concretely yeah whatever benefits the survival of the organism that's that's right might might makes right and that's why you're getting the idea of people are literalists who have this difficulty and it is true they are also literalists but I don't think the general semantics uh problem is is is just literalism I think that you know it's too uh narrow uh definition what would you call it I would call it uh mistaking words for things see I call it the thingification of ideas yeah because you have ideas and you have things ideas are abstract and fluid and things are well things being physical they're limited they can only no two things can be in one place and no one thing can be in two places right quantum theory not withstanding but uh things are are are limited and they're defined ideas are are undefined and they can an idea can be in two places at the same time an idea can be in two brains at the same time but the cookie if one stomach has the cookie the other stomach can't have that same cookie so um when people treat ideas in a concrete way I call it the thingification of ideas where for instance let's say a a particular propagandist has defined a word as triggering a certain reaction once you use that one word I know your whole ideology right and I don't like it right yeah right and that's how discourse political discourse has become dumbed down yeah because people can't even use language without upsetting each other yeah that's why kski I think call it General semantics there's more than just semantics involved here there's a whole uh way of mistaking the whole universe this is uh very interesting I'm glad we got this uh little podcast recorded okay and uh I'm sure it will stimulate some some abstract thinking I hope so I hope they don't uh thingify your yall think that this podcast is is a whole definition and and meaning of that's that's often the occupational hazard of saying anything meaningful is that people will be upset and say well why didn't you say such and such yeah and my response is always I didn't know that this was supposed to be the end all and Beall codification of this subject right no but you said this is what the subject is no I never purported that I'm giving you an exhaustive treatment of this entire subject I was just talking about it so then you know I've got one I've got one of those people that uh signifies things yeah what do you do words tell them to read General semantics yeah okay what's the story about the personality test um I think uh you it's not the personality test per se it's this whole gamut of there a particular story huh there's a particular story you had taken a personality test the class had taken a personality test on a Friday and now it was Monday morning and you were waiting to get your results from your personality test in order to be able to administer the test you had to give the test to each other so you were waiting Monday morning to get your results and somebody one of the students says you know this whole weekend I was so nervous about oh yeah okay oh this was a uh in a class that I was in at uh in uh grad school yeah and it was in the summer and they were all teachers it was a teachers uh program uh so the teachers came to this class in the summer mainly teachers and can I say the name of the professor because he was famous kind of if he's famous I I guess so if he's famous public person and he had a certain thing of say a way of saying things that I really enjoyed and his name was T Ernest newand T Ernest newand yeah he taught uh educational psychology testing so what was the story so they were tests various tests and he was having us take the test and then um you would uh get the results and uh okay so you can analyze uh you know the test so that's the way he taught the the course how how to take a test you took the test and then you learned from it so this was a personality test that we all had to take and uh it was questions about you know uh do you do you have cherry red stools yeah you remember that yeah that was a different test by the way than this one but uh yes and somebody was telling me you know somebody who took this uh test and he said that that's a this is a crazy test and that's one of the questions and I said oh that is weird and um so anyway this one the students were sitting around talking about the test and these students were teachers these were School teachers teachers taking a grad school class in the summer and we were waiting for the class to begin okay and um and TI Newland by the way had a way of saying things you liked his way of speaking Yeah because he would say imagine the craziest thing you can oh that's where that comes from yes and he said Somebody's doing it right now I've told this to my kids over and over again imagine the craziest thing in the world you can imagine not only has it happened someone's doing it right now yes don't I say that all the time and this comes from T Ernest newand T Ernest newand right t or d t okay so tell the story so T Ernest new is shuffling papers in front of the class you know uh organizing his uh lecture for the day yeah and we're sitting around waiting it's not time to begin yet but he's getting ready and he over here is uh one student say to the other well did you take that test yeah that was awful she said I was so afraid of coming in today this is Monday and getting the results of this test I thought of running my car off a cliff I was so nervous I so nervous getting the results of my personality test yeah that I thought about running my car off a cliff yeah right tiis Newland L stops shuffling papers looks up looks at her in the eye and says you don't need the results of this test you just took it right that's your personality test that's your personality test the fact that you were so anxious about the results of a personality test that you even entertained the say that but that was the impli yeah I think you know all my stories yes I do even ones that I've forgotten even the ones cherry red stools yes yeah I forgot I told you that yeah yeah okay okay well this has been really a delight and a treasure it has been for me too yes [Music]