Conversation on a plane

On an Intel Shuttle flight from Portland to San Jose, I sat next to an Indian man. I was reading a book called "LEMON Leadership" as part of missions training. He saw me reading it and asked me what it was about...and thus started an hour-long conversation.

So for those of you wondering what the heck am I reading...the book profiles different leadership styles into 5 categories. It is intended to be a way for us to profile the business owners that we minister to and to help them see their strengths and weaknesses in terms of leadership. It is pretty interesting so far but at the same time the engineer in me compels me to verify the profiles against people I see in real life.

After a brief overview of the book, I start talking to my neighbor about why I am reading the book and we get into a long conversation on religion and philosophy. He does not see why there is so much strife between different religions in this world because he thinks that they espouse many of the same beliefs. My limited experience with Hindu people is that they are very tolerant of other religions. One of my Hindu friends in college desribed Hindu religious tolerance to me in this way: the Hindu way is a circle that intersects with the circles of other religions around the world. However, my neighbor seemed to have more than a passing familiarity with Christianity. As it turned out, his wife is Christian.

He does mathematical proofs for chip designs, using different methods to verify their intended function. If you're wondering why this is important, consider when the first Intel Pentium chips came out:

From Wikipedia:
"The Pentium FDIV bug was a bug in Intel's original Pentium floating point unit. Certain floating point division operations performed with these processors would produce incorrect results. According to Intel, there were a few missing entries in the lookup table used by the divide operation algorithm.[1]

The flaw was independently discovered and publicly disclosed by Professor Thomas Nicely, then at Lynchburg College, in October 1994.[2]

Although encountering the flaw was extremely rare in practice (Byte magazine estimated that 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results),[3] both the flaw and Intel's handling of the matter were heavily criticized. Intel ultimately recalled the defective processors."

His work prevents these types of design errors. Anyway, he is a results-oriented type of guy. So we discussed religion in terms of tangible results: how do they affect the well-being of practitioners?

Forgiveness vs Letting things go
He talked much about how Hinduism affected the way he lives life. We only have so much control over our own lives and so those things we have no control of...we need to let go. We let go of those things for our own well-being because the other person who is wronging us does not have the same priorities. It sounds very similar to the concept of forgiveness. I won't go into what constitutes forgivenesss here but here's some current research: http://www.learningtoforgive.com/research.htm

Relaxation comes with knowing how to live life
Now that you've gone out and forgiven everyone, how does that affect your life? Well, from our collective experiences, we are both more creative when there is no pressure involved. He often comes up with solutions to problems when he is not focusing intently on the problem and is relaxing. If I'm trying to improvise music on violin, I notice that I am way more creative when I'm just jamming with friends for fun. I also realized that I compete much better when I am relaxed. It took me several years of competing in single elimination kendo tournaments to come up with ways of relaxing myself under pressure.

In addition, having a way to live life does give you some sense that you will be able to handle the future. My seatmate also happens to teach classes/mentors younger kids to give them that type of guidance. This is one way in which he expresses love for people.

Meditation vs Being in a state to hear God
A lot of people spend time with God in a prayerful, meditative way. My seatmate also happens to teach classes in meditation. He said that half an hour of deep meditation could be comparable to 6 hours of deep sleep. His comments piqued my interest since this is an area where I have not really focused at all. I do see warnings against New Age Christianity mixing meditation practices in with faith. In the case of my seatmate, it sounds like a way for him to center and prepare himself to meet the challenges of life. If I try it, I will need to judge any new insight by the fruit it bears.

Similarities and Differences
From the standpoint of tangible results, I cannot say that my seatmate was that different from other good Christian people I know. He follows his beliefs with action. These actions, teaching classes for the well-being of others, are an example of the love and concern he has for other people. His way of life gives him joy and he gains additional joy out of sharing it with others.

The main difference I saw occurred when I asked him: What is the purpose of your life? While I don't know what my true purpose in life is either, I do have the drive to find it. So I wonder if that is one thing that might separate God worshipping religions from others...that the lack of a creator might dilute the enormity of purpose.

But to be fair, a lot of Christians don't have a sense of purpose either.