The World's Job

One of the great spiritual teachers of the modern world focused extensively on the need to understand and use your will. For the moment, put aside any debate or doubt about the existence of free will. Don’t over think it. Instead, test it.[1]

Decide something you want to experience today. Self-Love? Empathy? Patience? Let’s try patience.

Go into your day with the will to experience patience. Choose it at every moment you can remember to do so. Will yourself to remember. Every tiny little thing you encounter. Patience. Each thing another person says. Every news story. Every car on the road. Did someone take too long to do something. Did someone make a “stupid” remark? Did you make a “mistake”? Patience.

The world, thankfully, will give you the opportunity to prove that you have will. Imagine that is the world’s sole purpose. Each obstacle, each interaction, an opportunity for you to manifest your will. Are you using the world properly? Decide that you want to exercise your will more each day. The world will challenge you, until you convince yourself. Then the world will stop, or you won't notice the challenges anymore (same difference).



[1] “One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.” Father Zosima. The Brothers Karamazov.



May As Well Look Inward

Reality is not what it seems.

As a species, we appear to be at the end of a relatively short interlude in history where mankind believed it had a full handle on reality with its collective intellect.

The most fundamental question about the nature of reality is whether form precedes consciousness, or whether consciousness precedes form. Is it a Darwinian form of randomness, or an intelligence behind creation? The relatively short period of human history where we decided it was the former, confident that reality could be understood by conducting a thorough physical examination of it, is coming to an end.

Newer scientific discoveries, if they are not pointing us directly toward consciousness, are at least pointing us away from form. Our mythologies, religions, mystical and spiritual traditions all tell us that spirit or consciousness is first, and that it “descends” into matter. If true, then science should lead us to the same place (some day). It has been more than 100 years since humanity’s brightest scientists told us that space, time, and matter as we understand them are not fundamental aspects of reality. For example, reality in the form of matter and space-time collapses in on itself at larger scales, into what we call black holes and singularities; the universe of space and time is expanding, but we don’t know into what substrate this expansion is occurring; and when scientists examine the smallest particles, they have no location at all. To be clear on this last point, it is not that the scientist cannot pinpoint the location, it is that, according to the understood equations, location is not a concept that has meaning to something in a quantum state. When those same quantum particles are sent through slits in a partition, one at a time (the “double slit experiment”), they don’t observe laws of time, space, or causality. Reality only seem to form our physical world under certain circumstances that man does not yet understand. Consciousness, in the form of an observer or recorder, could be said in nonscientific terms to create form as we know it. Whether these are accurate accountings of science or not, it is safe to say that as we learn more, reality gets more mysterious, not less. It defies our senses and common-sense understanding of cause and effect. In a literal way, it is nonsense.

In the natural intuitive insight, “I am therefore I am,” the first “I am” refers to the awareness of being, of thought, or consciousness, not to the material existence of the body. The awareness of consciousness is the proof of the thing. The reductionist world view, wrongly conflated with science, tried to challenge that intuition for several hundred years. People started building automata, and we have the theory of evolution suggesting a random, ground up, theory of consciousness, where consciousness magically appears from matter, given billions or millions of years of linear time. But even that theory of natural selection (which never seriously tried to address the "magically appears" part related to consciousness) is now being subjected to scrutiny: was there enough linear time for the required number of random mutations?  

And consider that our consciousness must retreat, on a regular basis, to the nonsense world of sleep and dreams, or the body it inhabits will die. Why? There is no good theory for why evolution would select for an organism that must remain helpless and asleep one third of its day and life.

As a side note, one currently popular theory of consciousness—of this being a computer simulation—evades altogether the fundamental question (form or consciousness). It does so because it still relies on form being fundamental, on consciousness arising from matter, it just punts the question to a higher level of an imagined hierarchy. It tells us nothing about consciousness, because we still have no theory as to how the simulation creators became conscious. It’s like the sci fi novels where species are uplifted genetically by other species, but there is always a fabled progenitor species, the origin of whose spacefaring consciousness nobody knows. It is not unlike pointing to a god to answer questions about morality or free will. It just pushes the question out in the hierarchy. You don’t answer the fundamental question by pawning it off on someone else.

If you want answers about the nature of reality, you end up, eventually, looking inward—even if you are one of the special people capable of doing quantum-level math. There is simply nowhere else to go. Science moves too slowly. And the senses cannot be trusted to reach fundamental reality.

For this journey, there are guides. There are people from every tradition throughout history who have looked inward and reported back to us. And there are many of those individuals whose lives, as living examples, indicate their advice is worth listening to. They say, in essence, that if you can find a way to let go of this logical interface, the self in space-time, of form being primary, even for just a minute, it will be more than worth the effort.

Looking Inward


There are many good guides to meditation. Below is a simple introduction.

To begin, ensure you have time set aside, whether 10 minutes, or an hour, where it will be relatively quiet, and you will not be disturbed. Silence your phone and move it away from you.

Prepare your body

  • Sit comfortably. Don’t sit cross-legged if you can’t stay that way comfortably. Assume a posture that accommodates being alert.
  • Consciously relax the physical body. Don’t forget your eyes, jaw, tongue, shoulders, stomach, butt, and feet.
  • Do something similar to one of these exercises: tense all of your muscles then relax them, or take deep belly breaths and exhale fully contracting your diaphragm. You should now be physically relaxed but alert.

Prepare your mind

[As with preparing your body, this is not meditation, but you will find that it helps.]

  • If necessary, take an inventory of the things your brain wants to think or worry about. Assure your brain that it can let them go for just a few minutes, and that they will be there to chew on when you get back. If you must, make a written list, so your brain knows it can briefly let them go without losing them.
  • Check your baseline (a made up term) – remember a time when you were perfectly at peace or when you just felt perfect. Chart your current state based on that. You can alternatively use this to chart: Say to yourself, “I am at peace,” or “I love myself.” Then observe, as if from afar, the thoughts and feelings that arise. Mark this baseline to keep a chart.
  • Make a simple “program.” Decide what you want to experience that day. For example, “I want to love all aspects of myself ” or “I approach life with an adventurous confidence.” This is a tool to address your practical life because meditation will facilitate noticing thoughts that may be contrary to what you want to experience. Thoughts contrary to what you want to experience make it harder for you to allow that experience into your life.  
  • In meditation, as you release thoughts, you will become increasingly aware of them. More and more subtle. Thoughts reflect your beliefs. Some thoughts or beliefs may be noticed for the first time. This causes an interplay between two very different things: the practice of meditation, the intent of which is not to focus on thoughts, and the psychological experience of becoming more aware of your thoughts and beliefs. Because of how important your thoughts and beliefs are to your practical everyday life, and because managing your practical, everyday life is important and can be supportive of a meditative practice, it makes sense to attend to these thoughts as a corollary to the meditation practice.
  • Often people are drawn to mediation because they want a better understanding of their life. Much of our understanding of life is dictated by our interpretations of reality in accordance with our thoughts and beliefs, which in turn arise from untold instances of prior programming. Programs can be changed.
  • Imagine you discover in observing and letting go of your thoughts that you are thinking that you are “not liked or loved,” “that something good happened, so now something bad must happen,” or that “people mistreat me.” Take that last belief out into the world for a moment. With such a belief, you are finely tuned to see evidence that supports the belief. You will see things you interpret as mistreatment, and that will be evidence used to strengthen your belief. You will fail to notice or to remember things that contradict the belief, and you will not interpret neutral occurrences accurately. You will focus only on certain memories from your life and even reinterpret memories to support your beliefs. Most of your memories are simply wrong. You will find excuses for why good treatment was an anomaly or was the product of improper motives. A smile may seem mocking rather than sincere. That is just an example, but you can see how that would apply to almost any belief. Your beliefs can alter your reality. In a purely mundane way, it is difficult in many instances to experience things that are at odds with what you “know” to be true. So, you change your programming -- "today I want to experience being treated with love." As you gain wisdom, so will your programs change.
  • Moving back to the topic of meditation. From a certain very broad perspective, your thoughts, or what experiences you have because of them or despite them, do not matter one whit. But they may be important to you, and the ability to make changes to your thoughtforms is a perk that goes along with meditation.

Meditation

Attention is stretching your awareness outside of yourself to notice “other” things. Instead of having it stretch to an endless stream of things, begin by giving it a careful direction. 
  1. Select a mantra. Sat Nam (truth is its name) is a good one. Inhale “Sat,” exhale “Nam.” So is, “I am Peace.” Breath in “I am,” exhale “Peace.” Place all your attention on the words.

    Or simply focus on your breath. Narrow your attention to the breath. The feel of the nostrils as breath passes. Feel it go in your nose, and down your throat and feel it warm your heart. This is a nature of reality – your most immediate, intimate interface with reality is the air surrounding and enveloping you, nourishing and nurturing you, giving you freely exactly what you need.

    Try a mantra one time, try focusing on your breathe another. You can also place your attention on a part of your body—your heart, your throat, between the eyes, the top of the head. If you find yourself mixing these three focuses of attention, that is also ok.

  2. Notice your body sensations, any background noise, your perception of location.

  3. Now go back to attention. The mantra or the breath. This is the sole focus. As thoughts arise, notice them just enough to realize you lost your attention on your breathe or your mantra, and let them go. Go back to the breath or the mantra. This is no longer the time to care about particular thoughts. Go back to the breath, to the mantra. Eventually, let that go as well. Let it all go. [If you achieve this for even one minute, you are becoming adept]

    Sit in stillness. Sit in silence. That is meditation. You are surrendering, you are sacrificing your thoughts and your worries in order to experience something different. Something beyond thought or description.

"My soul at once becomes recollected and I enter the state of quiet or that of rapture, so that I can use none of my faculties and senses. . . . Everything is stilled, and the soul is left in a state of great quiet and deep satisfaction." St. Theresa of Avila.

When a thought does arise. You are the one noticing it. Who is thinking it? And who is noticing you noticing the thought? That’s all still thought. Go back to breath or mantra. Don’t place a goal on your mediation. If images, scenes, colors, sounds, sensations, or feelings arise. Notice them. Enjoy them. Do whatever you want. If you need to, you’ll be back. If you want to try a new mantra of another technique, do so, but remember you are just trying to discipline or quiet the thinking. Meditation is silence. Pure Awareness. You may have other experiences before achieving real silence. But silence is the real goal.

“Meditation is really a form of emptying the mind of everything known. Without this, you cannot know the unknown.” J. Krishnamurti.

Our experiment is to see what might be if we can let go of the outer senses and the thoughts. To experience something new. The mind is so full, it must be emptied. Silence is not suppression of noise. It is the mind's natural state.

“Listen to silence. It has so much to say.” Rumi.

Afterwards

Try to carry some of the no thought into your day. If you have a profound experience, try to refrain from sharing it. By sharing, even with the most wonderful, well-intentioned friend, you reduce the experience to the words you and your friend settle on. You will often shrink it infinitely. Share an experience only when you truly own it and for a purpose.