A LUCILIUS PARABLE: CONSISTENCY

July 7th, 2019

Lucilius took a seat on a large boulder to look back on the progress he’d made, but a haze of grey erased his view.  Low clouds had rolled into the valley, covering the tremendous distance he’d walked over the past several days.  The ground, now rocky and gravel merely faded a few hundred feet below where Lucilius sat. 

He drank from a canteen and watched as the cloud rose higher, and higher.  The summit he was trekking towards was still another half a day away, and the rising cloud would make night fall quicker.  He capped his canteen and turned to continue on and find a good place to make camp.

The white mist rose up around him, making all the ground around him fade out towards nothing but white.  He kept his eyes to the ground just before him, watching his boots take step after step.  He paused to look around, seeing nothing, but knowing the way from the slope. He continued on, watching each step, one after another.  Time began to blur into a single moment, repeating, over and over.  With the cloud blocking his view, his whole sense of the situation narrowed, and he began to wonder if he was indeed trapped in a loop of some kind.  He kept on, noticing his breath in rhythm with the march of his step, and below the breath he began to sense the beat of his heart, all of it in a slow roll, repeating. Where many might find the trudge boring, Lucilius found himself falling into a sort of trance, meditating on the gift of a simple moment that seemed to repeat with no novelty.  Each time his mind wandered off to some distant worry or wonder, he quickly saw his boots again and the whole moment rolled him once more and again.

As the light of day began to fade, Lucilius finally decided to make camp.  Pleasantly tired from the long day, he decided to skip dinner and go straight to sleep, making a cocoon of his sleeping bag.

The next morning, when Lucilius awoke, he opened his tent to find that the clouds from the night before had vanished and he was surprised to find that he’d camped nearly on the summit.

He looked back down the mountain and down into the valley, amazed how all those blind steps had added up.

THE MIND'S PANIC ROOM

July 6th, 2019

A panic room is a concealed and secure room that exists within a house.  It is a way to safely hide when leaving the house is not possible.

Now, if we think of the mind in these terms, it’s easy to see that the mind is a house that we can never leave.  We are trapped in our own mind, along with all manner of terrible things we might imagine in order to torture ourselves.

But, as with something like meditation.  The effect is akin to building a panic room within the mind.  An ability to call into being a state of mindfulness creates the bizarre effect of being shielded from one’s own mind. 

As John Milton once famously wrote: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Which is to say, when our thoughts and emotions turn of the worse, we are trapped in our own mind with that reality.  Like being trapped in a house with burglars, villains or monsters.

Take anger for instance.  The experience is overwhelming.  The anger arises and swells in the mind with an intoxication that is not dissimilar to being drunk.  But the act of becoming mindful during such a situation is like existing somehow outside of the mind in a way that allows a person to look around make a fairly calm observation and assessment of the situation, such as  “wow, there’s quite a bit of anger going on right now.” 

It’s like watching a robber wreck part of the house on a monitor from inside of a panic room.

Even more powerful is that ability to shield one’s self from the personal monsters that we ourselves create.  Imagine, for a moment being able to hide and calmly watch those monsters that we ourselves dream up?  Imagine if it were impossible for those monsters to harm you anymore.

This is the panic room of the mind that a practice like mindfulness can create.

With enough practice, equanimity can be applied to anything, even to the terrible things that might exist in our own minds, that we mistakenly think are integral to who and what we are.

THE AVOIDANCE DECEPTION

July 5th, 2019

A sense or vision of ideal perfection is often broadcasted as the grand and noble reason why we delay and cease to make those beginning moves.

It’s got to be just right. . .

Anyone who honestly scrutinizes the ideal vision of their goal will see that it’s mostly just a hazy feeling of certainty and desire peppered with a few details.  No one dreams in fully formed  and complete ideas.  We follow notions and discover and iterate the details as we go, following that sense of aesthetic.

For many this is a hard process to get going with, especially if the topic or issue or design feels cripplingly important.

The self-defeating solution is to avoid failure and simply never start.

But this is again a linguistic illusion.  Failure is a negative word and in the emotional logic of language it makes perfect sense to avoid something negative, as one would avoid placing a hand on a hot stove.

the linguistic illusion is in the use of the word failure. 

It’s not failure people are avoiding.

People are avoiding growth.

Simply compare these two synonymous statements:

I’m avoiding failure.

and

I’m avoiding growth.

They essentially mean the same thing but they carry wildly different emotional weights. 

Avoiding failure feels forgivable.

Avoiding growth though…

that seems irresponsible.

BRAIN BUG

July 4th, 2019

Coders talk about debugging code.  Finding the one spot where things go awry, where the whole system stops or trips or redirects in a strange way.

What about debugging the mind.  Surely we all have a few bad ideas running around wreaking havoc from time to time.  Like bugs in code, bad ideas or narratives can keep us stuck in a bad system of thought and behavior, creating a vicious cycle and burrowing who we are deeper and deeper into a problem.

However, just as code can be debugged, the mind, and the ideas that run on our gooey hardware can also be debugged.  These bugs might look like bad habits.  And no matter how nonsensical, there is always a story that we are telling ourselves when such a bad habit rears it’s counter-productive head.  Sometimes, the mere act of saying this story out loud, by simply speaking the thoughts as they occur around a bad habit can be enough to totally disrupt a habit.  We become mindful and reflective in a way that exposes our thinking as opposed to letting it slide in the silence created by a private mind.

At the very least, saying such stories and thoughts out loud can spark a new perspective that breeds ideas about how to our own undermining behavior.

Getting rid of these bugs may in fact be more important than installing better ideas and habits. The urge and possibility of these better habits might already be there, lying dormant, remaining static from  friction caused by brain bugs making everything go haywire.

What’s required first and foremost is the idea that we can change who we are.  Without that idea, little is possible in the way of debugging our thoughts.

But, with a solid curiosity installed about who we could become,  everything is up for grabs, and like a program that instantly starts performing as intended, the mind can begin to weed out it’s own bugs and start performing as intended.

ONE SIZE FITS ALL

July 3rd, 2019

The concept of one-size-fits-all surely fell out of a hole in someone’s head that also happened to be a portal to hell.  The concept is trying to take a butter knife to the clunky and inconvenient reality that in fact, only one size is being made.

We need only engage someone to open up about some peculiarity of pain or irritable temperament that they’ve discovered regarding their own body to know just how peculiarly different everyone is. The same is naturally true when it comes to size or shape. 

But the phrase “One size fits all.”  It has a certain ring to it.  There is something democratic about it.  Or fascist… (Though communism is clearly the political system of choice for such a concept)

While Aldous Huxley might be giggling in his grave over the concept of One Size Fits All, we can be sure that Orwell is equally tickled by the irony of ball caps built to fit every size head that say ‘Make Orwell Fiction Again.’

There lies a deeper interpretation that we can draw from this one-size-fits-all.  Just as the one-size-fits-all item never really fits anyone very well, there is something else, something big, that many people, indeed most, often find a similar problem, that is: reality.

How often do our ideas about reality fail to be true?  Or put another way.  How often does reality prove to be stubborn to the way we’d prefer it to be?  Like the one-size-fits-all shirt that doesn’t really fit too well, we are constantly faced with the fact that reality is very often not as we’d like nor what we think.

The change has to be in the other direction.  Whereas any of us can dispense with a poorly made one-size-fits-all T-shirt and make one by hand that fits us perfectly, it’s the other way with reality.  We have to change ourselves in order to fit reality.  A sort of Procrustes bed of sorts.  But the good thing is that the human mind, beyond almost all else that we can point a finger at seems to be the most well equipped to take on this challenge.

Indeed, one reality fits all of us, whether we like it or not.  But those who flourish will realize what virtue there is in making themselves conform more and more to the reality in which we all find ourselves.  Unlike a T-shirt that doesn’t fit well, there is no returning the reality we’ve been handed.

Best to see what shape we can take to better fit it.