WASH

September 24th, 2020

Take a moment, unplug, get away, wind down, take a breather, relax - all of these are advertisements for a particular state of mind.  Whether it is a mindless state of mind, or an effortful one depends solely on whether or not our mind in question has training for it.  For many, this state of mind is one of pleasure - a brain steeped in margarita and vitamin D from sitting on a virgin island beach, or hot coco and Netflix in front of the crackling ski lodge fireplace.

But for the trained brain, Netflix and sugar and alcohol present only another variety of clutter and dirt for a mind in search of peace, purity and calm.  The difference is between the desire and attainment of a peak experience, and a sense of being washed of all that.  Washed of the incessant search of pleasure and rid of all the daily humdrum that we are so often looking to escape in favor of some peak experience.

Doing the dishes, or laundry, or cleaning house is certainly something we appreciate once it’s done, but rarely do we get excited for it.  That being said, it’s not uncommon for people to find a bit of serenity during such activities.  A sort of zen-like wax-on, wax-off rhythm can come to accompany these activities for many people.  The work comes to acquire the quality of a strangely peaceful and productive existence, and the results, when finished, are satisfying in an entirely different, albeit likewise peaceful way.

Meditation is a work and a training that has some similarity to those chores that can take on the flavors of zen.  But unlike the peak experiences that we strive for and plan, the fruits of meditation, particularly in a mindfulness tradition, offer the ability to unplug and wash the moment at any moment.

Whether standing in line at the bank, or dealing with a screaming child, or feeling the rising sting of a freshly cut finger.  Even in peak experiences that are negative, as with the accidental injury, or one marked by frustration, the trained mind can, at will, detach, step back, and one’s being can breathe, no matter how bad or intense the circumstance be.  This might seem outlandish or even nonsensical to those who haven’t experienced the fruits of such practice, but this disbelief crops up anywhere and in every circumstance where a person has not put in the time and the reps to achieve what someone else has.  For those just discovering Tinkered Thinking, it might seem quite amazing that there are nearly 900 episodes, but this is the result of a fairly simple daily practice done consistently for 900 days.  Likewise, the ability to sit down and bust out an episode that is fairly cohesive becomes quite a lot easier after such practice.  But again, for someone who has not put in the time and reps, the result can easily seem outsized and impressive. 

Training the mind is no different, and 10 or 20 minutes a day can, after enough time, grant a cognitive ability that may seem like a superpower to some.  What better advertisement could there be for some thing that allows you to take a vacation at any moment - to relax, take a breather, wind down, get away, unplug, but simply and instantly washing the moment of all that bothers the mind…

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: AUTO-OBSTACLE

September 23rd, 2020

Entertain a thought experiment.  Say your life has just ended and you are now in the afterlife and you discover that reincarnation is a thing, but it’s not exactly as religious traditions have lead some people to believe.  Instead, it’s a bit like the matrix, and now you are tasked with setting up the conditions of your next life.

What would you choose?

Say you have control over quite a bit: you can choose where you will be born, you get to choose what sort of parents will or won’t raise you.  You get to set the wealth variable on that family.  You get to craft the sort of obstacles that you’ll face in life.  Knowing now a bit of what life is like, what sort of conditions would you set for your new life?  Would you glow giddy at the opportunity and start setting conditions that make life a dream, with everything served on a silver platter and gilded spoon?  Or is a good fulfilling life a bit more complicated than perpetual pleasure and ease.  

Reward without overcoming trial is empty compared to one earned by effort.  

This is a platitude we all know despite our regular inability to act upon it.  But given this simulation thought experiment, how would it inform your decisions about configuring your next life?  Imagine if, in conjunction with this renewed memory about life being a sort of simulated game that we willingly configure and enter, your mind is again joined with memories of previous lives.  No doubt, setting yourself up with an immensely pleasurable and easy life was one of the first lives you would have picked.  This is certainly what most if not everyone would do.  

But pleasure and ease is its own trap.  The threshold of fulfillment is pushed every time we try to satisfy ourselves with stereotypical pleasures.  This is referred to as Hedonic Adaptation - meaning, we get used to the good life we live, we become inured and soon it’s no longer the good life because we yearn for more.  It’s a never ending process that can take people to unhealthy and even dangerous extremes - none of which appear to be fulfilling.

Given the obvious traps of pleasure and ease, how would you look at your next life?  Would a curious and cheeky strain of humanity rise in you, wondering what sort of story you might be able to create…. Would you fill life with interesting obstacles if only to see how well you could rise to the challenge?  It’s curious to wonder about the sort of people would would want to make life extra difficult for themselves, just to see how far they could go, how much of life they could scale, the depth of experience they might achieve and the breadth of ability that would have to be acquired.

Consider now if this was actually the case:  what if, before you were born, you configured and planned the very life you are living right now.  What if you consciously and purposely planted the obstacles that are causing you much stress?    What if you are completely responsible for the reality you are experiencing?

Regardless of who configured or designed it: are you rising to the challenge?

TOGGLING PERSPECTIVE

September 22nd, 2020

In a lot of video games we have the capability to change the point of view.  If it’s a role playing game, you can often see straight out of your character’s own eyes, but you can also toggle the view to watch your character from behind and above, watching the entire body of this character open doors, climb trees and jump across voids.  In some video games you even have the ability to spin the view around the character so you can simultaneously see the face of your character and everything behind your character.  

This change in view proves to be incredibly useful.  Zoomed out, it’s much easier to see an enemy or threat approaching from behind and take action before it’s too late.  But such a point of view becomes very unhelpful when you prompt your character to pull out a sling shot and aim at something.  For that it’s much more useful to see right out of the character’s eyes.

Now let’s toggle the perspective back to real life.  Imagine if you could have that bird’s eye view of yourself as you go about life.  Now imagine watching yourself from this perspective as you get angry at someone, perhaps a fight with a spouse or lover, or an extended moment of frustration after getting bad news at work.  How would you feel watching yourself have that little temper tantrum?

It’s not uncommon to see a child losing their cool in public, and regardless of how enlightened the perspective, no one sees that sort of behaviour as impressive or something to aspire to.  But do we as individuals truly integrate that opinion and change our own behaviour?  Or are we too wrapped up within the intoxication of emotion to occupy the right perspective and defuse our role in such situations?

Looking at our situation through our own eyes and trying to imaginatively see that same situation and our own self from another perspective adds an extra layer of perception to the world we see.

The more points of perception we can occupy, the more stable our understanding becomes, and with this stability arises the ability to see the clearest and most effective action that can be taken.

SUSPENDING THE PROGRAM

September 21st, 2020

A laundry list of good habits that are fully present in an individual’s life will do a ton of good when compounded through time.  But habits, once properly adopted and installed as routine become just that - routine.  Good habits become easier and easier with time, and the success they garner can seem strangely automatic.  What is more impressive, however, is when an individual can consciously alter their systemic behaviour.

Take for example fasting.  It’s impossible to make fasting a daily habit because after enough fasting, the lack of food is eventually going to cause some medical issues, and of course… death.  But fasting is a powerful practice to aid and bolster the health of the body.  So this becomes a conundrum.  How do we implement a regular practice that can never become a routine that feels effortless?

This question spells the important difference between success that is in some sense foretold by the promise of good habits continued and the willing ability to twist the model of our behaviour on command to fit the needs of a new or larger situation.

It’s one thing to institute this level of discipline once to instantiate a bunch of good habits, or perhaps a few times to get the ball of life rolling in the right direction, but it’s a far more powerful skill to express willpower on command.    It might feel as though we always have this available, and it is always possible, but like any habit or skill, it requires regular practice to keep in good form.

An accidental form of this is when a vacation or a move interrupts our routine.  Getting things back on track is an act of will more than it is picking up habits again.  It may be easier because these things have been a habit, but it still requires work to move against the antihabit that is forming in the absence of routine.  

Beyond this, it’s an argument for keeping a flexible and less regulated schedule.  The individual who can only be productive with a tight and decided schedule will flounder in a chaotic situation, but the individual who can flourish in a chaotic situation will be comfortable anywhere.  The difference is a practice of constantly suspending the program in exchange for a larger meta program that is flexible and far more powerful than the tracks created by mere good habits.

A LUCIILUS PARABLE: LATE TO THE PARTY

September 20th, 2020

Once the logs were alight, Lucilius picked up the cast iron teapot and held it to the bamboo spigot to fill it with water from the river.  The pot clanked down on the warm stove top and Lucilius opened his container of coffee, but just two stray dark beans remained in the bottom.  He closed it and tucked it under his arm and opened the cabin door.  The air of the woods was fresh and thick with a chilled mist.  Lucilius smiled as he trekked the short path to his underground storage, but as he pulled open the heavy wooden door, he noticed a new hole dug some short distance away.

Sacks of rice and wheat were torn open, but much of it he’d still be able to use.  The stores of canned goods were untouched of course, though Lucilius almost never ate from those choices, seeing them all as chemical souvenirs from a time before he left for the woods, when he was still immersed in that world of people and cheap gadgetry.  It was a continual pleasure to sustain himself so royally on the fruits of the natural world.  But still he returned to his cabin and took the kettle from the stove and nearly threw it to a side with a frustrated sigh.  His stores of coffee were destroyed.  Whatever animal had nested in the beans for some time, and Lucilius knew himself a fool when he pinched his nose to sift through the mess with a stick, as though me might some how convince himself that they might be washed and saved, but even for someone as resourceful as he, there was just no saving the mess.

He entertained the idea that he might somehow learn to live without coffee for a mere couple hours before he started planning his trek back to the wretched world of his fellow man.  It simply wasn’t worth it, he knew, to live so beautifully apart from such a corrupted civilization, but to do so without the exquisite pleasure of morning coffee.

It was a week’s trek back to the nearest metropolis - that city Lucilius had spent those final disgusted years, prepping and learning and itching to get away from the terrible mindless trajectory of his fellow man.  He tried not to speculate, to wonder how bad it had gotten, and instead focused on the contentment of trip, taking him far beyond any of his seasonal circuits while hunting and foraging.

And during those final days when he knew traces of would begin to appear he braced himself while growing ever more curious at the lack of sound.  He expected to hear the sirens, the searing hiss and rush of traffic and aircraft - that incessant and unsettling drone of a hellbent people.  But the subtle sounds of the natural world continued without being drowned out as he neared closer and closer to the place he once knew.  

As he noticed this strange and continued silence and wondered if perhaps that awful human experiment had found its end when he noticed a strange luminescence woven into the bark of a tree.  He stopped to inspect it, seeing that it seemed to be a natural part of the tree, as though it had evolved a natural bioluminescence.  The day was coming to the end, the sun deepening and with the encroaching darkness the same light was beginning to glow all around him.  This forest was alive with life now.  

Lucilius continued to walk on and began to notice a certain symmetry among the trees, as if now the forest was falling into a pattern of organization.  Then, between the gaps in trees his eyes took in a strange sight:  sitting on a beautifully crafted bench was an android, it’s legs crossed, one food bouncing casually to a pleasant and invisible rhythm, reading a book next to several huge sacks of coffee beans.  

Lucilius stood struck with the strangeness of the sight, and as if finally sensing his presence the android looked up to see Lucilius.

“Oh, there you are.”

“What?”  Lucilius asked.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” the android said, and then motioning to the sacks of coffee beans.  “I have some coffee for you.”

Lucilius merely stared, and the expression on the android grew a bit awkward and self conscious.  “I can… help you carry it back… if you’d like.”

But Lucilius stared, and then it was as though the robot finally clued in.  “Oh, you haven’t been back in a while have you?”

Lucilius just shook his head.

The robot winced at a memory.  “Yea… I forgot to read the whole briefing this morning, and I like to disconnect for as much of the day as I can.  Should have checked up on that detail.”

“How do you know I was coming for coffee?”  Lucilius asked.

“Oh, well, the trees probably told us.”  The robot guessed.  “Honestly, I’m not too sure.  I could check for you if you’d like.  There are many pathways the information could have travelled on.”

Lucilius looked again closely at the trees and the glow softly radiating from between the cracks of bark.

“Anyway,” the robot said, squatting down to heave the sacks of coffee up on to its metal shoulder.  “I’m looking forward to the trek - haven’t really been up this way because of terra norms.”

“Terra Norms?”  Lucilius asked.

“Well,” the robot said, again a bit awkwardly.  “You are uh, wanting to be left alone, are you not?  That’s why you left?”

“Yes..” Lucilius slowly answered.

“Well, that’s something that anyone can pick up on from a great distance away when plugged into the bionet.”

“The bionet?” Lucilius asked again.

The robot quickly looked around and gestured at the trees.  “Yea, everything is plugged into everything else now, and when it comes to someone like you, out in the woods who wants to be left alone, anyone plugged into the bionet can sense your wish to be left alone, and everyone respects that wish.”

“Things have changed a lot..” Lucilius muttered more to himself.

“Oh yea,” the robot said. “Things are way different since you left.”  The robot smiled.  “I did read enough to know when you left.  -But, we respect anyone who wants to be left alone, so there’s no way to really let you know what’s changed.  I guess the assumption is that you just wouldn’t care to know.  Can’t figure otherwise, you know?  Unless of course,”  the robot chuckled, “…you run out of coffee.”

“What’s the rest of it like now?”

“Oh,” the robot exclaimed, eyebrows raising.  “Well, so, uh, I guess I could show you, if you’d, uh…like.”  The robot offered, realizing suddenly it would mean missing out on the trek back to Lucilius’ cabin.

“Yes, I think I might like that.”