BA in Individualized Studies Program
"The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century." - Arnold Toynbee, Historian
This alleged quote of Toynbee may sound extreme, since for most of the 20th Century Buddhism was in retreat, squeezed between the materialist armies of capitalism and communism. Yet my personal encounter with Buddhism seems the most important event in my life, infecting me with a meme (a “social gene”) that alters the way I see my world, and informs my work as Goddard advisor, both in realms of social action and of theory.
I have a special liking for Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which can be seen as a very sophisticated version of the Buddha’s Right Speech, and am part of a small group in my town that has morphed from studying NVC to teaching it. NVC also serves as philosophy and a toolkit for two movements in which I am active: Restorative Justice and Servant-Leadership.
NVC suggests the ideal of Restorative Justice as a guiding principle for our criminal justice system. Inside prison I have taught NVC and meditation as complementary skills very useful for someone locked in a room with a lot of anger, his own and that of others. And on a Restorative Justice panel here in St. Johnsbury, I find that NVC constantly guides my presence.
My father, Robert K. Greenleaf, originated the concept of the servant-leader, and after his death, I became involved in teaching through the Center for Servant-Leadership. Later I came to see that a servant-leader could use NVC as a powerful tool for social change. Now, as a Goddard advisor, I try to fulfill my father’s dream that the teacher should be servant to the learning of the student.
Now I have a confession to make. I am a recovering mathematician. In my youth mathematics beckoned with the lure of discovering absolute truth, and also because it was far removed from the messiness and anxiety of social and sexual relations. In time I outgrew my adolescent fears and ceased to believe that the truths of mathematics were absolute; and transferred much of my attention and interest to Buddhism and the rest of my world.
But, once a mathematician, … There are still many things about mathematics that I can get excited about. Such as the extraordinarily rich connections between math and music, ranging from the simple patterns and symmetries of melodies, to the history of scales and tunings, to the possibilities of applying digital signal processing to music, and much, much more. This is not so surprising when you consider that the mythic figure of Pythagoras is seen as the source of our Western lineages of both math and music.
There are also rich connections between math and the visual arts, such as the “vanishing points” of perspective drawing discovered in the renaissance. There are many other uses of mathematics in visual design, particularly in the fabric arts, where recently it was discovered that the art of crochet could be used to make very useful models of “hyperbolic planes” (useful that is to the mathematicians who study these richly structured yet elusive shapes). While I didn’t inherit the artistic fluency of my mother Esther Hargrave Greenleaf, a fine painter and potter, I did come by a passion for art which has expressed itself creatively mainly in carving in stone.
I like to help people become more informed consumers of statistics, whether the numbers come from medicine, education, ecology, or economics. To learn to recognize statistical truth, it helps to learn how to lie with statistics. If we attempt to understand statistical truth we are quickly led to the history of statistical thought. It should be more widely known that the word “statistics” originally meant statecraft, the art of wielding power. And statistics leads to many things being measured, converted to numbers, things that are perhaps better left qualitative. Think of your IQ, a number that supposedly captured or measured your intelligence, but actually reduced it to a number, draining the word “intelligence” of meaning.
I believe that mathematics is just common sense, that when you think about mathematics, you are doing ordinary thinking in a rarified domain. (And I hope you will feel free see things your own way and come to believe that mathematical thinking is somehow special.) Thus it is my hope that by studying the nature of mathematical thought we may learn something useful about our own minds. Heraclitus asked if you can step into the same river twice. My (heretical) study of mathematics tells me that equality is always conventional—there is no absolute notion of identity, of sameness. It would lead me to ask Heraclitus to define “same” before he asks the question. To determine a notion of equality, we need to agree on “which differences make a difference”, in the words of Gregory Bateson.
Mathematics has an aspect of great rigor and precision, yet is also full of paradox and ambiguity. How is it that mathematics is both the most mental and the most objective of the sciences? How is it that the minds of finite beings can encompass the infinite? How can a process be a thing? How can many become one? How can nothing be something? How can a = b when a is not the same as b? Seeing the creative quality of ambiguity and paradox in mathematics may help us to appreciate similar creative forces in our lives.
As a Buddhist recovering mathematician, I have often participated in the dialogue between Buddhism and mathematics (and science in general). A high point was being part of the first Mind & Life meeting of Western scientists with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I can also advise on meditation and other general Buddhist topics. My experience is largely with the Tibetan tradition, where I have been authorized and encouraged to teach by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and by Ken McLeod.
Home is now Saint Johnsbury, VT, though my heart remains in New York, the city of my birth. I have three grown children and live with my wife and two dogs, my companions in exploring the woods and mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire.
Educational Background: PhD in Math, Princeton; BA in Math and Physics, Haverford.
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Newcomb Greenleaf, PhD