People who influenced me

A friend shared a wonderful exercise. You write down at least 50 people who have contributed to your growth and development, or who had a significant positive influence. They can be people you know, such as relatives, friends or teachers, as well as writers, thinkers, musicians, artists or even politicians.

It is easy to overlook important people, so it is worth reflecting and returning to the list. Among other things, it made me realise how important music is to my life, as many of my entries are musicians. It also crystallised the importance of people who got me into things like guitar, travel, maths, valuable books, chess, personal growth, Spanish and fractals. In one case it was just an email from someone I did not have much contact with. This exercise made me realise how much abundance I have been exposed to thanks to other people. It is a process of making gratitude to other people explicit, which is of great value. I am pleased that some of the entries are recent.

Writing this piece has been a voyage of discovery and a process of integration. It has meant composing an intellectual and emotional autobiography, but with the focus on other people. It is a valuable acknowledgement of the people who helped me become who I am.

I have omitted the people I knew personally from the list below, as they are relevant only to me. The names are not in any particular order.

Writers and thinkers
1) Erich Fromm - gave me precious insights on loving and on being vs having.
2) Carl Jung - his ideas opened me up to a deep and radical journey into the human psyche.
3) Karl Rogers - his ideas about non-directive counselling made a big impression on me. I strove to apply them in counselling contexts, including on my Telefriend shifts.
4) Jiddu Krishnamurti - is the deepest and most radical thinker I have encountered, though he would hate to be called a "thinker"!
5) Ludwig Wittgenstein - his ideas about language are of fundamental importance to philosophy. He silenced the radical skeptic by saying that such a person should first doubt the meaning and validity of words before attempting to use them to cast doubt on reality.
6) Bertrand Russell - gave me a valuable overview of philosophy. "Men want certainty not truth."
7) Karl May - I read his books in Polish as a boy and they made an indelible impression on me. They were about the wild west but very much on the side of the Indians.
8) Robert Stevenson for Treasure Island. This was formative reading that stimulated my sense of fantasy and adventure.
9) Daniel Defoe for Robinson Crusoe. This classic book fascinated me as a boy, inspiring me to dream of exotic places and adventures.
10) Kurt Godel - inspired me by discovering the limits to human thought in the realm of mathematics, such as the axiom of choice. This has philosophical implications that stimulated and in some ways formed my thinking by helping me to embrace uncertainty. The consequence of accepting uncertainty is intellectual humility, knowing that I can be dead wrong.
11) Alain De Botton - for his refreshing psychological insights. I continue to read and summarise the articles from The School of Life. One of his key insights is that it is our very woundedness that connects us to other people most strongly.
12) Arthur Koestler - for many ideas such as his synthesis of humour, scientific discovery and art. Koestler believed that the basic flaw in homo sapiens is not aggression but devotion. Probably more than anyone else, he has written about a wide range of topics in depth, as I aspire to do.
13) Ken Wilber - is a New Age philosopher who gave me a philosophical overview of Eastern, Western and New Age thought. "Boundaries are illusions."
14) Jared Diamond - gave me an overall view of human evolution and the great patterns of human history, with the latter mainly determined by accidents of geography. He has great breadth as well as depth.
15) Dale Bredesen - he discovered the causes and remedies for Alzheimer's Disease.
16) Albert Einstein - forced me to rethink the most basic ideas of space, time and the universe. He is the epitome of the creative intellectual in purest form.
17) Niels Bohr - quantum mechanics revolutionised physics, dematerialising matter itself and radically undermining the very idea of causality. Many others, such as Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Louis de Broglie, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger were prominent in developing the theory, which is the most successful in all of science. I list Bohr because his formulation, the Copenhagen interpretation, changed my view of the material world. Bohr, "An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field." and "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."
18) Ken Keyes - his New Age ideas inspired me to make my Choosing Happiness tape, which was my major and all-consuming project for quite some time. I think I sold around 500 copies.
19) Andrew Harper - his book got me to walk around Mt Blanc, which set me on the path to higher things.
20) Werner Heisenberg - put uncertainty onto a firm scientific basis. His principle has deep philosophical implications. Together with Godel and Wittgenstein, he has inspired my sceptical approach to all human-made systems.
21) Arnold Toynbee - gave me an overview of human history. He sees the twin mistakes of past societies as living in the future or the past. To flourish, societies must look for creative solutions to present problems.
22) Daniel Kahneman for Thinking, Fast and Slow. He is a brilliant psychologist with many insights into how we operate. His analysis of the remembering vs the experiencing self is fundamental.
23) Postman and Weingartner, for Teaching as a Subversive Activity - "One way to see the history of the human group is as a continuous struggle against the veneration of crap."
24) Damien Brown wrote Bandaid for a Broken Leg - an inspiring true story of a doctor who volunteered with Doctors Without Borders in war-torn Africa.
25) Kobie Kruger for her book Wilderness Family. It is an inspirational and touching true story of living in a game reserve and bringing up a lion. The author has a great sensitivity to the animals.
26) Bookey Peek for her book Wild Honey. "We had a mutual understanding about our children, my pig and I. She trusted me with her piglets and I trusted her with David". This was about a wild female warthog. The parts about the honey badger are unforgettable.
27) Carlos Castaneda for the Don Juan books. To this day I don't know whether the works are fantasy or anthropology. The consensus is that they are fiction. However, the writing is powerful and evocative of an unknown dimension to which a Yaqui shaman gives entry. The books exercised a fascination on me and opened me to non-rational ways of seeing the world.
28) Oliver Sacks for his books on how the brain works and the many ways it can go wrong. In particular, he made me realise that visual perception is a complex process that requires an enormous amount of learning.
29) Yuval Harari for Sapiens. A brilliant and profound book that is stimulating me a lot.

Others
1) Maurits Escher - opened my eyes to what is possible in the visual domain.
2) Antoni Gaudi - his architecture and decorative style have delighted and inspired me.
3) Rosemary Kariuki - showed what one person can do in terms of helping others. She identified isolation as the main problem of African and other migrants and found a way to remedy it. I would like to join her programme. "Information is more valuable than money."
4) Garry Kasparov - I read his autobiography and did not think much of it, but it gave me the idea to write my own.
5) Nelson Mandela - showed by conspicuous personal example how to forgive and how to reconcile.
6) Fred Hollows - showed me that one person can have such a huge impact on the wider world. He is one of my heroes.
7) Mikhail Gorbachev - by causing the end of the Cold War and tearing down the Berlin Wall he gave me hope that oppression cannot be permanent and that the world could become a better place.
8) David Attenborough - for his inspirational books and films exploring the wonders of the natural world.

Musicians - these men have created music that gives me direct access to beauty, a beauty that touches my feelings. The first 14 are classical composers who don't need an introduction. These are roughly in order of my preference.
1) Bach
2) Beethoven
3) Mozart
4) Schubert
5) Brahms
6) Sibelius
7) Chopin
8) Rachmaninov
9) Dvorak
19) Domenico Scarlatti
11) Soler
12) Debussy
13) Vivaldi
14) Handel
15) Shivkumar Sharma - created magical santoor music in the Indian classical tradition.
16) Jacques Loussier - created jazz versions of Bach's music. This was my entry to the wonders of Bach.
17) Anouar Brahem - is an ud player and composer of enormous gifts who created a fusion of Tunisian music with jazz.
18) Manos Hadjidakis - wrote romantic and lyrical songs of great beauty.