A LUCILIUS PARABLE: FLYWHEEL

August 30th, 2020

Lucilius was walking along a wooded path, accompanied by a young boy who had taken to him in recent months.  Lucilius smiled as the two walked peacefully, reflecting on how such connections arise, how we all seek out people to be our parents and brothers, our sisters and children regardless of how plump or scant our own real families be.  

Birdsong moved between and around them, creating a chorus of melody within the forest.  The dirt path crunched softly as they took each step, each on ground of tattered light, filtered from the high canopy.

Lucilius realized he and the boy had not spoken in some time.  Though it was pleasant, and important to enjoy silence in company, Lucilius also knew how much it had meant to him when he’d once been a boy and an elder had asked him what his thoughts were.  That someone would wonder, let alone care enough to ask had always stayed with Lucilius.  

And so he asked, “What you thinking?”

The boy grew suddenly conscious, clearly having been lost in thought and reverie.  He was looking out at the trees, and slowly he smiled.

“I was wondering if the trees are really alive.”

“What makes you think they might not be?” Lucilius asked.

“Well, they don’t move, and without their leaves, in the winter, you can’t tell if a tree is dead or not.”

“A fair observation.  So is it the leaves that reveal their life?”

“I don’t know,” said the boy.  “That’s what I was wondering about when you asked.  But I guess so.  The fact that they grow.”

“What about rivers?”

The boy wasn’t sure what Lucilius meant.  He gave him a funny look.

“Rivers are constantly changing.  Sometimes they start off small, and then they grow and grow, and they can even move around and change course, and a river certainly moves a lot more than a tree does.  So in some sense it seems that a river is more alive than a tree.  At least in the way you’ve phrased it.”

The boy nodded a little, looking back at the trees.  “But you can kill a tree,” he said.

“You can’t kill a river?” Lucilius asked.

“How would you do that?” Asked the boy.

“Well you could build a dam, and that is certainly quite a lot harder than killing a tree.  Does that mean it’s harder to kill a river?  And if it’s harder to kill, does that say something about it being alive?”

The boy pondered a moment.  “But a river is just water falling down along the ground, like down a mountain, the water doesn’t really have a choice to go downhill.”

Lucilius smiled and then slowed his pace and then took a step off the path and then crouched down before a new sapling that had recently emerged from the ground, its first leaves spread wide to catch what little light there was on the forest floor.  The boy drew to Lucilius’ side and hunched down also.

“Let me ask you,” Lucilius said.  “Did this little tree have any choice about the water that activated its seed?  The seed would have stayed dormant, and for all purposes, unliving, had it not been for a little water and some heat in the ground and in the air.  So does the seed choose to become a tree?  To split and reach upward?”

The boy pondered this last point more deeply.  “That’s a good question, he said: is a seed alive before it sprouts?”

“What about you?” Lucilius asked.  “Did you have a choice to be born?  Did you have any influence over where you were born, and to which parents?”

“No..” The boy said, and he looked away for a moment, suddenly concerned.  “Wait, does that mean I might not be alive?”

Lucilius smiled widely.  “Well if you’re not alive, then I don’t think I could in good conscience say that anything is alive.”

“But where does it end and where does the living begin?” The boy asked.

“Hard to say,” Lucilius said, “but it’s clear that once we get going, we seem to become something entirely different.  It’s as though we are, each and all of us, given this good first push into the river of time, and once we get moving, it seems like we gain this ability to decide how we get pushed by time, we get some little bit of influence over which direction we get pushed.  Perhaps that’s what living is.”

“But…” the boys thoughts trailed off.  “Last week you asked me if I could predict or decide what my next thought would be and I still can’t do it.  It’s like I don’t really get to choose, it just seems like it.”

“Fair point,” Lucilius said.

“So if it’s not choice that makes us living, and the fact that we move around is like the river, then are we really any different than anything else, like rocks and air and stars and stuff?”

Lucilius smiled.  “That’s a good question.”

ANTSY EXIT

August 29th, 2020

A novice meditator will often come across the instance during a session when they just want ‘out’.  There’s so much to do.  The day’s schedule is packed.  Some of these things are important and need more preparation.  Perhaps other stresses are weighing emotionally, maybe even physically, and the idea of sitting for 10 or 20 minutes doing nothing just seems like it’s not the greatest idea today.  Even then, a novice meditator can experience this antsyness for the session to be over without any obvious external reason.  There are certainly times when you just don’t feel like it.

As with everything that crops up in meditation, this too is an opportunity for insight.  While an experienced meditator might be able to navigate this feeling and the accompanying thoughts deftly and with skill, a novice can benefit from a bit of prepared strategy, specifically in the form of a couple questions.

When that faceless and ambient anxiety to get up and get away from the meditation session arises, we can deepen our practice significantly by asking: what exactly would I be running away from?

Taking this question as the object of meditation quickly yields a core insight of the meditation practice in general:  meditation is a practice that grows our familiarity with something that is always present, no matter what we are doing - namely: the moment.

In terms of our experience of the moment, what really is the difference between sitting and breathing and directing the mind to simply notice what’s going on within the sphere of consciousness, and doing anything else?  Certainly the activity is different, but is it the external that determines our experience?  Or is it our internal perspective of external circumstances that determines the nature of our experience? 

This is where the school of stoicism and the meditative insights of buddhism intersect.  The philosophy of stoicism advocates a practice of internal direction before external influence: meaning, decide how you allows the events of your life to influence who you are and what you do, don’t let those events decide for you by impulsive reactions.  The ability to pause, be thoughtful and determine the way you wish to interact or be at peace with circumstance is the core aim of stoicism.  It’s also, as it turns out, much the same result that a practice of mindfulness meditation achieves.

The stoic who takes up a mindfulness practice and experiences this anxious sense of getting up from the session to do something else would wonder:  how do I want to react to this anxiety?  Do I want this anxiety to steer my life?  Or would I rather stay the course?

Chances are, the anxiety that goads us to get up from a meditation session is still going to be there as we move on to different activities.  Even if it does fade from our experience, there remains a thread of consciousness that persists through all of these changes, whether we are meditating or not.  It’s that vivid thread that meditation enables us to grow closer, and with enough time, and practice, that thread becomes a tool used to stitch together a better life.

MEME WOMB

August 28th, 2020

All artists and thinkers seek to be a unique meme womb.  This is the pinnacle of intellectual and creative life.  It’s what awards are given for, it’s how legacies are established, how fame is formed, how religions and countries are initiated, and also how innovation creeps into the world.

A meme is just an idea, or a cultural unit, a piece of information that is somehow interesting in a way that enables it to replicate and spread to new minds.  A single word is a meme, but so are phrases, and pictures, gestures, brands, symbols, even stories and people. 

We use memes to make sense of the world, and memes use us as hosts in order to propagate and live.  To be sure, some memes don’t have our best interest in mind and operate like parasitic viruses, or put another way: there are some really really bad ideas that float, persisting through time despite being bad for people to be convinced by.  The funny thing about this fact is that both the individual infected with a parasitic meme and a person who consciously labels that meme as bad will agree with the above statement - that for whatever reason, bad ideas can persist.

The artist, intellectual and creator is an individual who hoovers up memes, through reading, watching, listening and research with the hopes that two or more memes might combine in a novel and interesting way.  This is the instance of having an original idea.  No idea is born of pure nothing.  It’s always some sort of remix - a combination of prior knowledge, know-how and ideas that creates a new perspective or utility.  

There’s a lot of hope in this notion of discovery.  Everyone is thirsty for that new idea.  Fame and wealth and prestige lie in the wake of great new ideas.

But of course there’s a rather foreboding dark side:  What if you come up with a really infectious idea that is quite bad for us?

Would you be able to stop it once you tell other people?  New memes are a bit like children.  We might be the cause of their existence, and we like to think we have a hand in their development, but at the end of the day they go off on their own and form their own life.  Our pride or horror is somewhat left to luck and fate as to whether the life of that new meme brings wellbeing to humanity, or not.

SLY UTILITY

August 27th, 2020

The utility of a question seems pretty straight-forward.  You don’t know something, so you ask in order to get an answer.  This transaction is almost boring at first glance.  Perhaps it’s spiced up by a sense of embarrassment when we feel shamed into thinking that we should already know the answer.  Now the transaction seems weighed down with a kind of burdensome debt.  The question becomes a stress, a thing to avoid a bane of our experience.  All this just relegated to the questions that other people have answers to, and to say nothing of the infinite open-ended questions that no one has an answer for.

But folded within the dismal appearance of such a paralyzing moment lies an opportunity to flip it all inside out with a bit of artistry.  

Language is an absurdly flexible medium.  It is an everything machine.  For example, it just crafted an experience of a question-and-answer situation in a terrible light.  It’s an experience we’ve all had: it can actually be quite painful to feel the need to ask a question that is embarrassing to ask.  But now, allow language to take the exact same circumstance and turn it inside out.  Watch and listen as language transforms itself, and by doing so transforms your sense of this transactional question-and-answer..

A real expert or master in any field has arrived at that state by continually moving forward into a cloud of unknown to explore, learn and understand.  For many such individuals, it’s not an overwhelming and debilitating sense of confusion that drives their pursuit, but rather a healthy curiosity, and we need only wonder: what is the relationship between curiosity and questions?  Is it a relationship as fraught and difficult as the one between confusion and questions?  This question can be further expanded and drilled into:  How does a curious expert receive and view a question?  Does such a person roll their eyes in annoyed frustration at the burden? Probably not a sign of a curious expert if that’s their reaction…

A well formed question can accomplish a surprising alchemy of outcomes: 

it can flatter the person being asked by presenting them in the role of teacher and expert, 

it can conceal the embarrassment of the person who doesn’t know, 

it garners the answer to increase understanding, and

it can strengthen the bond between the person with the question and the person with the answer.

The question, if artfully crafted can create a synergy between two people who we might originally see as existing within a hierarchy fraught with some power dynamics.  With an artful use of language, we can simultaneously manage emotions surrounding confusion and create an interaction where all gain.

CURIOSITY & HOPE

August 26th, 2020

Hope is generally regarded as a good thing.  But is it?  Hope is what draws us forward.  The hope for accomplishment, the hope for love, the hope for peace, the hope for a better future.  

But do these things not denigrate our assessment of the present by default?

Doesn’t a claim that tomorrow could and should be better imply that the present moment is somehow… bad?

Hope, as a concept is detrimental in the same way the notion of having a passion is detrimental.  These concepts isolate us from the moment and lend us to fall victim to wishful thinking.  By hoping for a better future, we can miss what we’ve actually got, in terms of the present moment that is ripe for peace and contentment, and in terms of seeing clearly the raw materials we have to work with.  

Hope is a dream world that offers the possibility of forming impossible ideals that we cannot live up to and which may simply not be possible in the real world.  How could the danger of such a thing be so subtle and understated.  How is it not obvious that hope can be a sly enemy?

The answer lies in the capacity of a dream world to make us feel a certain way.  It’s nice to imagine it, because in imagination, a thing can be flawless.  In imagination, things can be devoid of reality, and that escapism can be intoxicating for someone who has not yet seen a beneficial way of using the raw materials that their life currently offers in new ways.

For an individual who seeks to accomplish something that really is new, hope is a dangerous concept that should be regarded as null.   Think about it this way, what would your life look like, and how would you approach your current work and projects if hope wasn’t a concept in your brain.  This isn’t to say that your life is hopeless - not at all.  But that hope and failing to have hope are both absent from your life.  How would that change things?

Or approach it from the reverse.  What happens when outcome turns out to be different than what we hope?  Disappointment ensues.  Hope is the sly mother of expectation, and expectation is the sole alchemist of disappointment.  In the absence of expectation, it’s just not possible to be disappointed with how things turn out.  The outcome is merely more information about this world and reality that you are exploring.  Hope is actually, completely unnecessary for moving forward toward a better life.  There is instead an unexpected nemesis of hope which lives quietly within all of us, one that has on hand infinite reserves of liquid oxygen to pour into the fuel tank of our life, one that is easily ignored, one with a quiet voice, one that is powerful but lacks the need to be judgemental, one that is drawn forward - not by hope - but by a genuine interest in the unknown:

That ally is curiosity.

Consider for a moment how an immersion in a thread of curiosity resolves the conundrum of enjoying the present and shooting for a better life:  when curiosity is at the helm of our attention, we experience a strange amalgam of interest, desire and peace.  Paradoxically, the curious mind is totally satisfied with the process of the moment but still moves forward, making progress, adding to the moment while eschewing all need to compare it to anything better.  

Forget things like hope, and passion, expectation, and desire.  All of these feelings and concepts fail us, tugging us down nefarious rabbit holes of emotion.

All of these inadequate concepts and emotions, their functions, their inequities, all of them are subsumed by the synergy of the curious mind.  The curious mind is thrilled not just by the expected outcome, but also the unexpected outcome.  The curious mind wonders what might exist in the realm of tomorrow while evoking a serene experience of the moment. 

It may be strange to try and imagine a world without a need for hope, but you need only ask: are you curious to see what it’s like to move forward without a need to hope?