Slow down

too antsy
always considering yesterday
or what I will do after work
while taking a piss
standing in line
walking from the car to the office
what just happened?
moments lost
this is most of life


A Buddhist parable:


"A traveler, fleeing a tiger who was chasing him, ran till he came to the edge of a cliff. There he caught hold of a thick vine, and repelled down the edge hoping he might wait out the tiger. Above him the tiger snarled. A moment later he heard another snarl, and to his surprise, there was second tiger, peering up at him. The vine swayed him midway between two tigers.

Two mice, a white mouse and a black mouse, began to gnaw at the vine. He could see they were quickly eating it through. Then in front of him on the cliff side he saw a luscious bunch of wild grapes. Holding onto the vine with one hand, he reached and picked a grape with the other.

How delicious!"

Uncertainty

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
– Albert Einstein

"To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown – the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none… The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear …"
– Friedrich Nietzsche

"Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds – justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner."
– Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat


We trust what we see, what we feel, what we touch. We have a way of believing in the permanence of it, in the reality of it, in the truth of it. Few care to embrace the uncertainty in life, or to acknowledge the limited capacity for perception and retention that we posses. Life becomes so much simpler when I can simply say "I don't know." It's the most honest thing I've ever uttered. I think our natural tendency is to follow that up with the phrase "but I will figure it out." This is the mistake, the challenge is to be at peace with uncertainty, to embrace it. The best we can do in life is "highly probable."

With his head on her stomach, the incessant internal chatter was calmed like the rough seas of Galilee. The cacophony of voices was muted with a gentle stroke of his hair. "Peace be still" she seemed to say. For the first time in a long time, he heard the gentle brush of his skin against fabric, the gentle thump of his own heartbeat. It was a heavy silence, certainly an unfamiliar one.

These moments usually made him writhe in discomfort. The dual threat of boredom and isolation were always creeping closer. But somehow this time was different. It was a restful silence. Like a cat on a sunny window ledge, he paused as a gentle sleepiness came over him.While the chatter had a way of keeping him energized, it was also very tiresome. Without it, his jitteriness melted away like wax and he sank deeper into her body. He fell asleep a few moments later.  

 

On Meditation...

The founder of our Order, Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett, who studied meditation under some of the greatest meditation masters of Japan, translated the classic Zen texts on the mind of meditation as saying that the critical element is, "Do not try to think, and do not try not to think". She likened the mind of meditation to a person sitting under a bridge beneath a busy road. The "traffic" on the road is our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, emotions, etc. To try to mentally stop the traffic is to "try not to think". The same is true of dulling the mind to the point where no traffic is noticed at all. These approaches would seriously unbalance the harmony of meditation: the first one by increasing concentration to the point of excluding awareness, the second by decreasing awareness to the point that only concentration is left. On the other hand, to leave one's sitting place, get up and accept a ride in one of the cars is to "try to think". One's mind is literally "captured" and "carried away" by a particular thought or feeling, so that what was simply a passing thought turns into a ten minute chain of thinking. Here, the concentration has been insufficient, and awareness has lost touch entirely with the basic fact of things-as-they-are: the fact that we are just sitting there. Whenever we find that we are doing something other than just sit there, we gently bring our mind back. This is done over and over again, and is the work of meditation practice.

 Another useful observation which Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett made about meditation was the distinction between natural and deliberate thought. Suppose, for instance, that a dog barks while we are meditating. We naturally hear the sound, and perhaps the thought occurs to us that a dog is barking. These are examples of natural thought; they are part of things-as-they-are, part of simple, aware sitting. This is meditation, and nothing needs to be done about it. But suppose that we continue the chain of thought: we next think that the barking disturbs our meditation, that our neighbor should control their dog better, that something really should be done about this lack of consideration·, and the next thing we are aware of is that we "wake up", realizing that we have spent the last five minutes giving our neighbor a lecture. This is deliberate thought and is inconsistent with serene reflection meditation. We need to bring our mind back to the awareness of simply sitting there. 

http://www.berkeleybuddhistpriory.org/pages/meditation/meditation.html

Two years too late....

There was a time when my world
Was filled with darkness
Then I stopped dreaming now
I'm supposed to fill it up with something

In your eyes I see the eyes of somebody
I knew before, long ago
But I'm still trying to make my mind up
Am I free or am I tied up?

I change shapes just to hide in this place
But I'm still, I'm still an animal
Nobody knows it but me when I slip
Yeah I slip, I'm still an animal

There is a hole and I tried to fill it up with money
But it gets bigger till your horse is always running
In your eyes I see the eyes of somebody
That could be strong

Tell me if I'm wrong
And now I'm pulling your disguise up
Are you free or are you tied up?

I change shapes just to hide in this place
But I'm still, I'm still an animal
Nobody knows it but me when I slip
Yeah I slip, I'm still an animal

Mind vs. Emotion

A clash between mind and emotions is a clash between two assessments, one of which is conscious, the other might not be. It is not invariably the case that the conscious assessment is superior to the subconscious one; that needs to be checked out. The point is not that we follow the voice of emotion or feeling blindly, it means only that we don't dismiss our feelings and emotions so quickly; we try to understand what they may be telling us; we don't simply repress, rather we try to resolve the conflict between reason and feeling. We strive for harmony, for integration. We don't simply slash away the pieces of ourselves that don't fit our notion of the good or the right or the rational.

The solution for people who seem over preoccupied with feelings is not the renunciation of feelings but rather greater respect for reason, thinking, and the intellect. What is needed is not a renunciation of emotion but a better balance between emotion and thinking. Thinking needs to be added to the situation, emotion does not need to be subtracted from the situation.

http://mol.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/NathanielBranden/BenefitsAndHazards.html

The Need for a Value System

I think the excerpt below is quite important:

"And the point right now is not whether she was right or wrong in all respects of that vision, but that she had a vision, a highly developed one, one that seemed to promise comprehensiveness, intelligibility, and clarity -- one that promised answers to a lot of burningly important questions about life. And human beings long for that.

We humans have a need to feel we understand the world in which we live. We have a need to make sense out of our experience. We have a need for some intelligible portrait of who we are as human beings and what our lives are or should be about. In short, we have a need for a philosophical vision of reality.

But twentieth-century philosophy has almost totally backed off from the responsibility of offering such a vision or addressing itself to the kind of questions human beings struggle with in the course of their existence. Twentieth-century philosophy typically scorns system building. The problems to which it addresses itself grow smaller and smaller and more and more remote from human experience. At their philosophical conferences and conventions, philosophers explicitly acknowledge that they have nothing of practical value to offer anyone. This is not my accusation; they announce it themselves.

During the same period of history, the twentieth century, orthodox religion has lost more and more of its hold over people's minds and lives. It is perceived as more and more irrelevant. Its demise as a cultural force really began with the Renaissance and has been declining ever since.

But the need for answers persists. The need for values by which to guide our lives remains unabated. The hunger for intelligibility is as strong as it ever was. The world around us is more and more confusing, more and more frightening; the need to understand it cries out in anguish.

One evidence of this need, today, is the rise of cults, the resurgence of belief in astrolgy, pop mysticism, and the popularity of self-appointed gurus."

http://mol.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/NathanielBranden/BenefitsAndHazards.html