“Search Inside Yourself” — compassionate, scientific, businesslike

I've got a new favorite book: Chade-Meng Tan's Search Inside Yourself — the unexpected path to achieving success, happiness (and world peace).

It didn't take much searching inside myself to realize that I liked Tan's approach to mindfulness, meditation, and all that stuff. Just reading the forewords by Daniel Goldman and Jon Kabat-Zinn, along with Tan's first two chapters, had my inner self saying "Yes, yes, yes" this morning.

Here's one Yes passage:

In learning and teaching meditation, the good news is that mindfulness is embarassingly easy. It is easy because we already know what it's like, and it's something we already experience from time to time. Remember that Jon Kabat-Zinn skillfully defined mindfulness as "paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally."

Put most simply, I think mindfulness is the mind of just being. All you really need to do is pay attention moment-to-moment without judging. It is that simple.

My initial Yes, which led me to buy the book, came from reading a story in the New York TImes, "OK, Google, Take a Deep Breath."

Employees coming from fast-paced fields, already accustomed to demanding bosses and long hours, say Google pushes them to produce at a pace even faster than they could have imagined. Google’s co-founder and chief executive, Larry Page, recently promised on the company Web site to maintain “a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

Little wonder, then, that among the hundreds of free classes that Google offers to employees here, one of the most popular is called S.I.Y., for “Search Inside Yourself.” It is the brainchild of Chade-Meng Tan, 41, a tall, thin, soft-spoken engineer who arrived at Google in 2000 as Employee No. 107.

Think of S.I.Y. as the Zen of Google. Mr. Tan dreamed up the course and refined it with the help of nine experts in the use of mindfulness at work. And in a time when Google has come under new scrutiny from European and United States regulators over privacy and other issues, a class in mindfulness might be a very good thing.

The class has three steps: attention training, self-knowledge and self-mastery, and the creation of useful mental habits.

Tan is an engineer. He's got a scientific, systematic, non-religious approach to mindfulness/meditation which resonates with my churchless non-soul.

(Also with the aspect of me that spent two years in a Systems Science Ph.D. program back in the 70's; I still mow our large, convoluted lawn with great precision, always searching for an improved mowing pattern that minimizes my time and maximizes cutting criteria, such as least amount of clumped clippings when the grass is tall.)

I was pleased to find that according to his book's index, Tan only has two references to Buddha in the 247 pages. Both are brief quotes. Excellent.

And understandable, given Tan's engineering attitude toward mindfulness, and the fact that he has been teaching Search Inside Yourself in a corporate setting, Google, comprised of a large number of diverse, highly intelligent, and similarly scientifically-minded employees. 

Still, compassion is a key concept in both his book and the course. Compassion is fun. It leads to happiness. Importantly, compassion also is profitable. Here's a Tan TED video where he speaks about "Everyday compassion at Google."

In the first five minutes he gives several examples of how Google employees initiated charitable projects on their own. Only later did they become official Google initiatives. 

This demonstrates the obvious: compassion, mindfulness, meditation, self-awareness, charity, serenity, peace — "religious" or "spiritual" people don't possess these things in any greater measure than the rest of us. 

In fact, positive qualities (like negative qualities) can't be possessed, because they aren't ours. In fact, neuroscience is pretty sure there's no such thing as an "ours," since there is no such thing as a "me." 

Chade-Meng Tan has a quirky, appealing sense of humor. His book is filled with light-hearted illustrations. Thumbing through it, I didn't see any religious'y images. Nice.

Still, Tan says he is a practicing Buddhist. Check out his personal website about Buddhism, where Tan tells us:

Welcome to "What do you think, my friend?". This site contains a selection of writings on Buddhism.

This site takes a highly personal and practical approach towards Buddhism. Here, there are no deep philosophical discussions on Anatta or Sunnata. Just ordinary people like myself sharing insights and experiences on how Buddhism had benefitted us, and exchanging some nice stories and a few good jokes about Buddhism.

This is why I named my website "What do you think, my friend?". In this little corner of cyberspace, there is no Great Master. There is no, "Please enlighten me, Venerable Sir". There is only a funny guy living his life and sharing it. There is only, "What do you think, my friend?".

Launched in May 1995, this site is one of the oldest Buddhist sites on the web.