My father, Constantin David, was a thinker. An old-fashioned kind of thinker who spoke seven languages and dedicated his life to intellectual and artistic pursuits.

He was fond of Latin sayings, which he pronounced the old fashioned way, like Mr. Chips. ”Nehil novi sub sole”, (not the new fashioned, “Nihil no-we sub sole”).

His favorite adage when people around him argued about superficial things, “Degustibus non disputandum est”.

Constantin had been a filmmaker in Germany in the ‘30’s. His films, thoughtful and considered, sometimes dark and always honest, depicted the twists and turns of human life.

They expressed the pre-WW2 intellectual ambiance in Europe. He used to say his approach to film making was scientific. This approach reflected the scientism that took over the western world after the turn of the twentieth century and influenced everything from physics to business.

By “scientific” Constantin meant that he looked for the underlying principles that governed human perception of light, movement, form, and the acquisition and retention of knowledge.

Constantin was an artist, a painter mostly, who as a young man often visited Pablo Picasso in his Paris studio. There he would set up his easel and absorb whatever brilliance he could from the great painter.

At one point during his time in Paris he befriended the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, who introduced him to a new approach to consciousness and experience. Learning, for Constantin, was the most important thing in life: it touched every part of existence, it was the essence of everything.

When I was a child, we lived in the back of a big old house in Los Angeles that housed the language school my parents ran after Constantin was forced to retire from teaching at UCLA at age 65.Our house was marked by “hobos” (itinerant homeless men) as a place where they could get a warm meal and a few coins.

When hobos came to the door of the school, they were directed to the small backyard; when they entered that yard, they ceased to be vagabonds and became guests.

It was my job to set a place for them at the garden table using the same dishes and silverware we ourselves used. There the men could sit quietly and eat the meal that Constantin prepared for them.

If they asked to work in exchange for food, Constantin found a task for them, raking some leaves or sweeping the porch; every person, Constantin believed, had a contribution to make.

Although he had lost his family in the holocaust, he never spoke about it. He wasn’t a victim, and he rarely expressed blame and never hate.

Over the years my graduate students, and participants in Life UnLearned, have heard the story of Papa’s Glasses. It’s one of my favorite stories about Constantin because it’s so very him. It also very clearly demonstrates the tyranny of knowing (the belief that what I know must be the Truth), one of the three tyrannies associated positional thinking.

In brief, Papa’s Glasses is the story of how when I was a child Constantin found a solution to a severe double vision that came upon him when he was about 70 years old.

His ophthalmologist told him that there were no glasses that would correct the problem, so for a time he patched one eye or the other throughout the day.

But this was not a satisfactory solution, since it took away his parallax vision with the result that he broke a lot of glasses and stumbled when he walked. From his days in filmmaking, he understood how light behaves as it passes through different refractive materials, so he started tinkering with lenses and prisms.

After a time, he came up with the formula for glasses that allowed him to see with both eyes. Years later I asked him how it was that he knew more than the doctors. He answered, “I didn’t know more, I knew less, so I wasn’t limited by what they knew.”

What we know can hold us back. If I had to choose a defining moment when the seeds of non-positional thinking were planted in my brain, it would be this one.

So, this was my father, or at least, how I have remembered him. He was my intellectual role model, so it’s no surprise that his thinking formed so much of my thinking.

The seeds of learning (and un-learning) he planted in me eventually took root in Non-Positional Thinking and the Life UnLearned course.

Over the years the ideas that sprouted from those seeds have come to define my life’s work.