In this issue:

· Red Riding Hood and the Wolf

· The Power of Zero

Red Riding Hood and the Wolf

Some of you may have had this assignment from one of your grade school teachers: Now that you've read the story of "Red Riding Hood," rewrite it from the viewpoint of the wolf. The story may have been something else, such as "The Three Bears" from the viewpoint of the baby bear, or "Cinderella" from the viewpoint of one of the stepsisters. The story had to be in the first person (the "I" viewpoint).

The results were often comical, especially in the hands of clever students with a sense of humor. Every once in a while, one or two students would come up with a deep insight into the character he or she had chosen or been assigned.

In our most recent drumming and poetry gathering in Harvard, Mass., we did this exercise. But instead of folk or fairy tales, we wrote about real people in our lives. I think the results were astonishing.

Teachers and facilitators often have a result in mind when we set up an exercise like this. My expectation was that the men would write in the voices of their fathers, their partners, their children – people in their lives who could be sources of both joy and pain. I of course followed my own expectation and wrote two poems from my dad's life. One was about his smoking cigars at 14 and being caught by his dad. The other was about the loneliness of being on the road as a traveling salesman.

None of the other men wrote anything close. One piece was a meditation by a Tibetan prayer flag as it was strung up at a family gathering. Another was a complaint by a local beaver that had been plaguing the property around where we were meeting. Still another was a sensitive portrayal of a woman at a silent retreat, who had had some difficulties with her fellow retreatants. The last piece was a memo from a particularly difficult fellow employee.

The common theme in all of these poems, meditations, and essays was empathy - the kind of compassion that can be made possible by putting ourselves inside another person's (or animal's or object's) being. We may think of ourselves as compassionate beings, but the writing exercise helps make that compassion concrete. It was amazing how much each man had put aside his own personality to become someone or something else.

This is an easy exercise to do on your own, say, in your journal, or in a men's group. I'd like to hear from anyone who tries it. How successfully did you get outside yourselves? What insights did you get? If I get enough responses, I'll report in a future issue of Menletter.

The Power of Zero

The invention of the number (and concept) of zero revolutionized mathematics. For the first time, it was possible to do (and write) base-ten calculations. Zero has some interesting properties, in addition to being able to hold the one's, ten's, and hundred's places in calculations. Any number raised to the power of zero is one. Any number divided by zero is undefined.

I became acquainted with the psychological power of zero in doing a meditation technique called holotropic breathing, or simply breathwork. In holotropic breathing, the participant engages in deep, rhythmic breathing while listening to a carefully chosen suite of very loud music. The participant often achieves a trance-like state, with vivid images. Sometimes the images are abstract. Sometimes the images are very real. They may consist of reliving certain life experiences, having conversations with long-dead ancestors, or having fantastic experiences such as being in the midst of a Civil War battle or dancing in a harem. As the music begins to slow down and become quieter and sweeter, there is often a powerful emotional release.

Somewhere during the breathwork I've experienced, I come to a point at which time and space have totally collapsed. I am at zero: there is no time, and there is no space. What is most powerful about this experience is that, at this zero point, there are no temporal or spatial constraints - whatever the "I" is that is experiencing this can go anywhere in time and space. In fact, the "I" has disappeared into the zero. Or it's as I have been divided by zero and have become undefinable.

We might think that, in ordinary geometrical space, three dimensions is about as real as we can get. Two dimensions constrain us to thinking about a plane; one dimension is simply a line. But when we hit zero dimensions, we're at a single, dimensionless point: all constraints fall away.

There are other ways to get to zero or close to it, some of them extremely unpleasant and not entirely of our own choosing. We lose a job, or a marriage, or a parent. We lose our health. We hit rock bottom in a pit of drugs or alcohol. We fall prey to the blackness of depression. We feel that we're at the point of annihilation; we're at zero, we are zero - so far down that everything looks like up. If we can survive the journey into nothingness, we often find ourselves at a new beginning. We have a sharper view of the infinite possibilities, a clearer view of what's really important to us and to the people around us. From the zero of near-annihilation, we rebuild our corner of the universe.

One of the spiritual goals of many people is to "destroy" the self, to become the non-self, to transcend the duality of right-wrong, good-evil. A person can spend a lifetime in learning philosophies and doing meditation and breathwork in search of the non-self, the zero.

Adversity may be a more efficient way. We don't need to seek out adversity or learn special techniques from a guru to induce it. Most of us get a full measure of adversity several times in our lives. Some even live entire lives of adversity. If we're very, very lucky, some of our brushes with annihilation will open - even if just the merest crack - the doors to infinite possibility.