SPOTLIGHT REFLECTION

December 22nd, 2018

Try for a moment, this simple exercise:  Try to turn your attention to the thing in your mind that is paying attention.

Or to put this another way: can you turn your attention upon some thing within you that is understanding this sentence?

It’s a very difficult to merely hold as a concept in one’s mind – let alone begin to execute.  It is a mental exercise that is used in Dzogchen meditation practice and is much the subject of Douglas Harding’s book entitled ‘on having no head’.

Harding uses the fact that you can never directly witness or see your own head, positing that the use of a mirror is an indirect experience.  Remembering that the prefix ‘re-‘ at the beginning of the word reflection means ‘again’ might help illuminate the idea that any reflection is a kind of second-hand experience. 

We might for a moment wonder about how much a blind person identifies with the image of their own face.  Surely such a person would be familiar with the tactile contours of their own face, but it’s impossible to identify with the image of one’s own face if blind.  In this respect with regards to the face, it would be akin to going through life without ever coming across any kind of reflective surface. 

Even in such a fantastical world that would presumably be cured of narcissism, there is still plenty to focus on, and even if the head and face remains elusive, we have little reason to seek out the seat of our attention.

If for a moment however, we visualize our attention as a kind of spotlight which can be trained on definitive objects, whether that light be shining on the sensations of breath while meditating or upon some problem we seek to solve or some person with whom we speak, this subject-object relationship becomes easier to work with. 

We talk about laser-like focus which already encapsulates this idea of attention like a beam of light with which we illuminate the nature of the thing upon which we concentrate. 

Our existence starts to look like that small iconic lamp featured in the presentation of the name ‘Pixar’ at the beginning of movies. 

Now imagine, with a head like a lamp, or a powerful spotlight, or even a laser, looking in a mirror.  Think about how disorienting this would be to suddenly be blinded.

We can even imagine wearing a headlamp in a dark room, training the light on different objects we are working with, and then accidentally looking in a mirror and being blinded by our own effort to focus.

Such is a kind of visual analogy for the experience of trying to turn attention upon itself.

The experience is disorienting because eerily, it doesn’t seem like any thing or anyone is really home.

Everything that might seem like the seat of attention is actually just shining that spotlight on something else other than itself.

If the responsive thought is “this is ridiculous, the seat of attention is in my head.”  This is actually retraining attention upon that linguistic sentence.  Which is akin to giving someone a description of what chocolate tastes like and expecting them to fully comprehend the taste of chocolate even though they’ve never tasted it.  The thought about the seat of attention is simply another new thought that is occupying our attention. 

The origin of attention is elusive, but trying to find it is a valuable exercise for decoupling our feelings, thoughts and actions from an overly determined and unhelpful sense of self.

LANGUAGE

December 21st, 2018

Compare the usefulness of language in two different situations.

The first one is every day life, your job, your relationships, running errands, scrolling through social feeds, watching a movie, reading a book.  How much of these things are a function of language?  All of them are intimately tied to language and our use of it.

Now compare to the second situation:  The effort to survive in the wilderness with absolutely no other person or help?  How useful is language in this situation?

In this second survivalist situation, language might play some kind of tertiary role if we can find some way to write things down in order to log memory of things we’ve figured out, but chances are most of our efforts are not going to revolve around making the sounds of language and trying to make graphical marks.

This is all language is, a bunch of sounds and graphical marks.  And it’s utility is completely dependent on the presence, interaction and contribution of other people.

How many times are we told to not care what people think?  As though this is somehow freeing for our personalities to have more agency.

Is this not a bit of a contradiction to the fact that our greatest attribute as a species is our ability to cooperate?  We have skyscrapers and Wikipedia and a global food system, not to mention rockets flying to space and robots exploring other planets, all because we have figured out how to cooperate with each other.  And is not caring what other people are thinking and doing a core structure in the mechanics of cooperation?

Language as an invention is a construction that is purely for the purposes of finding out the details of what someone else thinks and feels.  Whether this be a new found philosophical work that we are interested in, the instructions for a gadget that someone else built or a raging twitter feed full of hot tempers and stunted perspectives, language is the bridge between minds.

Those people who instruct not to care what people say or think are spelling out a kind of paradox since such a statement is riding on the core assumptions of language as a technology and therefore counting on the fact that someone listening will care about such a statement.  This paradox is most elegantly illuminated in the following two sentences:

This sentence is false.

The previous sentence is true.

Here we run into a kind of zen koan, but if we look at the previous instruction to not care what people think, we can see another subtle form of this zen koan.  It’s akin to saying, don’t care what anyone thinks, except the person who came up with this thought because it’s a thought worth caring about.

We might narrow our use by tacking on some stipulations: only care about what some people think.  But which ones?

Such a path inevitably leads to a narrowing of knowledge and inputs, which is not good.  While it is good to maintain a kind of information diet in order to free up concentration and attention for meaningful tasks, deliberate ignorance cements the problem into place. 

We might find the advice to pay no heed to what people say or think very attractive, but why?  Is it not almost always to forgo some kind of vulnerable emotional reaction we might have?    The real problem here is not what people say, but how we integrate such things into our minds.  If we can change our thinking to accept any and all incoming language with the full knowledge that we will be able to parse out what is important and useful and what is simply designed to try and get the best of us, then we open ourselves up to a much larger and more nuanced understanding of what our great game of cooperation is doing.   And by doing this, we can, through a calm, thoughtful and peaceful lens determine a better way that we can be of use to our fellow people.  If we spend our time merely reacting with hot emotions to everything we hear and read, then we rob ourselves of a thoughtful integration of everything we experience.  We rob ourselves further by withdrawing the possibility of figuring out a more fulfilling way to live in relation to our fellow people.

In the realm of language, all things can be true, as we can demonstrate with paradoxical koans.  The great balancing act is observing which parts of our language game map well onto reality.  Unlike language, not all things can be true in the world of matter and the laws of physics.

This difference in scope between language and reality is both a source of great ill for our efforts of cooperation because people can pontificate fictions, but it also functions like a cattle prod for reality.   By imagining with language some state of reality that we have never seen, we can push our manipulation of reality to test whether something dreamed in language is actually feasible, and through this imaginative stretch, we haul the configuration of reality through better and better iterations and improve the lives of ourselves and our fellow people. 

Such a process is not without much crumbling on the part of language against the laws of reality.  Dreams should be reimagined as fast as reality gives us feedback about what is possible.

It is only by moving through such huge amounts of fiction and testing them against reality in much the way a prospector will sift large quantities of rock to find gold, that we sharpen our nuanced understanding of reality and how to alter it for greater benefit.

Here lies the whittling tool for our use of language.  By testing reality with action, we come across useful information far more efficiently than simply batting around ideas between people.  Language is the infinity tool through which we can imagine anything, but reality is the validating tool that we must constantly use to hone our idea of the possible.  By listening to the vast cacophony of people we share this world with, we can best get an idea of what actions we might want to take to try and improve reality.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

December 20th, 2018

When we sit down for a great meal, what exactly is the best part of that meal?  The 14^th bite of food?  Do we even remember the 14^th  bite of food? Or even really notice it as it happens?  Most likely not

The experience of food is all at the beginning and maybe a little at the end.  It’s those first couple bites that seem to have the most pleasure.  After that it’s often more about finishing the meal than it is paying acute attention to how full our stomach is, or will be since there’s a delay designed into the appetite and satiation mechanisms we have for food. 

Our attention and focus about what we are experiencing might come back on line at the very end with the last couple bites when the anticipation of the end is rising.

But for the most part we are going about one of the most sought after experiences with very little presence and mindfulness.  It’s not just ironic, it tells you something fundamental about the brain’s mechanisms for motivation and fulfillment.  It’s a sad truth that we are often motivated to obtain things and experiences that only offer the most fleeting sense of pleasure and rarely have much contribution to an overall sense of well-being.

But what is of greater interest here is the pattern and process of eating a meal.  It is literally accomplished by breaking down a large whole into small pieces.  We literally accomplish the act of eating a meal through bite-sized pieces.  And yet, this all-too-appropriate language is actually rarely used to describe what it literally refers too.  Along with this bite-sized progress, we find the most pleasure at the beginning and perhaps at the end.  This portioning and swing in pleasure is a pattern that curiously also maps on to the process of solving a problem, except that pleasure is swapped out for difficulty.

Any problem of sufficient size requires breaking down into smaller portions.  Part of the art of solving problems is figuring out how much to bite off and chew on.  If we don’t breakdown the problem into small enough pieces, we may lose momentum with our problem solving because we have bitten off more than we can chew. Likewise, a piece too small might not be satisfying, and may make the problem seem larger than it is because we are breaking it into pieces so small that the number of pieces we need to chew is gargantuan. 

When it comes to eating a meal, getting a handle on this portioning issue is quite natural.  We all figure out quite quickly how much we can and should fit into our mouth to enjoy what we’re eating.   But with problem solving, such sizing is much more difficult and since problems can vary so drastically, portioning a size of the problem in which to break off can often require an index of mental models in order to judge with any kind of accuracy.

Another way that the experience of eating maps on to this idea of problem solving is our variance in motivation.  At the beginning of the meal is when our anticipation is greatest and our experience of pleasure is most present.  This is in accord to the difficulty of problem solving.  Often the hardest part of solving a problem is simply beginning.  And likewise with attention coming back online at the end of a meal, difficulty paradoxically seems to rise as we have the end in sight with regards to an accomplishment we’ve been working on.

Seth Godin refers to this as ‘the Dip’, and it’s when success has never been closer, is in fact just around the corner but our motivation bottom’s out. 

This paradigm of eating can be useful when staring a problem in the face.  We can ask simple questions inspired by the daily experience of eating.

We might ask: am I working on a piece of this puzzle that is just too big?  Or perhaps too small?  Is it even a real piece of the puzzle? Or am I trying to chew the plate instead of the food?

Regardless, it’s food for thought for the next time we find ourselves stuck.

MENISCUS

December 19th, 2018

When we think of a border or a boundary, we are more likely to think of a wall, a chain-link fence or something equally obvious and foreboding to surmount.  But borders and boundaries come in all sorts of  constitutions and grades of substance.

We might for a moment think about the surface of water in a glass.  This surface represents a kind of border between the wet part of the glass and the dry part.  But this border has some characteristics that are far more interesting than a standard wall or fence.  If we fill the glass to the very top and then continue to add miniscule portions of water, this border will bulge up on the rim of the glass.  This is simply the phenomenon of surface tension, and when too much pressure is applied, it will break and begin to spill over.   This doesn’t seem like much of a border or boundary, but only if our definition of a border is preoccupied with impenetrability.

If we think of borders or boundaries less as fortified entities and more like basic demarcations that we might want to deal with more wisely, then the seemingly pathetic boundary of the meniscus formed by water’s surface tension offers more to contemplate and reveals different perspectives for strategy.

We need only think of one of the innumerable bugs that uses the delicate force of surface tension to it’s benefit.  Many have evolved to walk on water and they achieve this by delicately working with the boundary created by water’s surface tension.

We might imagine such little buggers, if they could be questioned about the nature of their relationship with the surface of water would not bash the border for being weak, but would extol the opportunity present by respecting how delicate such a border is.

We might extrapolate this notion into other parts of our life and think about what borders we constantly barge through and ruin as opposed to delicately pressing against such borders, moving them and changing the configurations we find ourselves in without damaging such boundaries. 

The boundaries of interpersonal relationships might come to mind.  Just about all such boundaries can be gently moved so that we can get along together without truncating our personalities, but if we act unabashed with little respect for the realities of such boundaries, then instead of moving such boundaries, we might ruin them and create unnecessary problems for ourselves.

Such delicately managed boundaries might even be good representations of limits within our own selves, limits that we can push to become more capable, or limits that we can harmfully destroy.  Perhaps in some circumstances this is exactly what we want, but in other cases, if we want to preserve something without making a mess, but still change the way things are arranged, we might do best to be a little more thoughtful about using a more patient and delicate touch.

ATTENTION: IT'S A STRETCH

December 18th, 2018

The act of attention creates a tension between our mind and the object we focus on.

The words attention and tension both come from the same Proto-Indo-European root ‘ten’ which means to ‘stretch’.

Indeed, when we learn under the duress of school it can literally feel like a stretch to understand what is going on.  Particularly when we have no natural interest in the subject, or the method of teaching is wholly uninspired.

But what about those rare times when good quality focus does not feel like a stretch?

For such times, and the subjects upon which we meditate, we might think of the yoga teacher who seems naturally flexible, demonstrating difficult postures with ease.

The nature of the stretch changes depending on how much practice and time we devote to it.

Coming from the other side of the equation, we might think of the time and practice that companies have put into the stretch from their place in culture to our minds.  How much of the difficult work of focusing attention has already been done for us by those who wish to direct and control our attention and ultimately turn it into a commodity?  Or do such companies simply look to take advantage of the ways in which the human mind has a natural range of flexibility for pleasure and anxiety?  If the symbols that provoke such responses are obvious, then our minds are quick to stretch in those directions.

If we compare this relative ease to the difficulty of concentrating on a new complicated subject about which we know nothing, the obvious symbols that provoke pleasure or satisfaction are nonexistent.  Our progress with such a new subject is determined nearly exclusively by our ability to jump from the satisfaction of one tiny victory achieved through new understanding to the next tiny victory of understanding.  If the time and effortful distance between these stepping stones of satisfaction are too far for our personal nature, we will abandon the task.  If we can achieve these tiny milestones before mental exhaustion, then our likelihood of continued learning is higher.  As these tiny victories slowly accrue, our ability to stretch our mind further and further with regards to that subject increases. 

It’s clear the mind can stretch further and further given the exercise and we can understand more and more if we push ourselves.

Or that ability can be appropriated by companies that specialize in manipulating attention.

The question that remains is: how will you exercise your attention?