PERPETUAL FAILURE

September 28th, 2020

The goal is to fail, and to succeed means to realize you’re failing.  This is at the heart of a mindfulness meditation practice.  To simply notice that you are thinking, to realize that fact, is in some sense to become aware that you are not following the prescription of the practice.  Or rather that you haven’t been following the instructions.  But the very act of realizing that one has been lost in thought is to invoke the aim of the effort.  

The simple fact is that we are nearly always, perpetually lost in a rabbit hole of thinking.  And we are lost in this maze without even realizing it, as though we are drunk on the act.  A mindfulness practice pulls a person out of this narrow point of view, expanding it to include all that is going on.  We’re often lost in our own private rabbit hole of thought at the expense of noticing some fairly mundane things, like the feeling of breath entering and expanding our body, the sense of that body’s weight against the ground, the temperature, the pressure, the light or darkness that engulfs us, among an entire host of other simple aspects of what it’s like to be experiencing life.  

But these simple variables are often overlooked as we are lost.  And yet, the mere noticing of such simple variables can relieve our mind of much un-needed effort.

Strangely, it’s the act of downgrading the importance and prevalence of variables of consciousness that make our experience more aware of the moment.  The more focused we become on any one variable within consciousness, the less connected we are with the moment.  But the instant we downgrade the importance of this variable and become able to incorporate an awareness of a wider variety, the more in touch with the moment we become.

Mindfulness meditation, is in some sense, the practice of continually noticing how unimportant a single thought is in the grand scheme of things, and to realize it’s a failure to concentrate on such at the expense of so much else that is going on.