Today's meditation

A couple of hours ago I finished a meditation session, the second of the day. Each was a 10-minute meditation, guided by Sam Harris, then 20 minutes of timed meditation. Just me and my conscious experience.

Wow.

It started this way:

So take your seat and close your eyes and bring your attention to the sensation of sitting. Notice how the body appears in consciousness and see if you can relinquish the shape of the body. If you feel its shape, pay closer attention to each sensation as it arises.

He’s given instructions like before, something like “experience the body as a cloud of sensations.” and this time I got it. The “tension in my neck” changed. It was the same feeling of tension, but a “tension in my conscious experience.” There was no neck.

Words don’t convey the feeling of suddenly being a not-quite-embodied consciousness. It was strange, and it was freeing. I know there’s more to come.

It was exciting.

Going to France

Imagine that you’ve always wanted to go to France—Paris, in particular. You’ve read everything you could about it—geography, history, culture. You learned the language. You’ve spent hours looking at pictures and reading guidebooks. You know all the facts.

You’ve read what people who have been to France have written. You’ve learned about their feelings—the ones they say are unique to being in France and being in Paris.

You’ve heard them describe the emotions that they associate with no other place on Earth.

You yearn to see those sights and feel those feelings.

You have similar emotions—you think. You’ve been to places that have evoked feelings similar to what they’ve described—you think. So you have a kind of understanding of what they might have felt—you think.

You can imagine what you think the experience might be.

But you’ve never had the experience.

And then, one day, you close your eyes, and when you open them, it seems to you that you are in what is unmistakably a small French village. Not Paris, but still.

What you experience is part of what you’ve read about and heard about. Everything is familiar. It’s what you’ve been seeking.

You know that you’re closer to Paris than you’ve ever been—and the next time you open your eyes, you might be there.

Today

Today was like that.

I’ve read a lot about meditation, about the kinds of experience that people have.

I’ve read what people have said about their feelings when they’ve experienced the things I’ve read about.

I understand the theory.

But the closest I’ve come to the experience I’ve sought has been occasional momentary flashes of “waking up.”

They’ve been a foretaste.

And today I found myself that much closer to what I had been seeking.

As I sat—without a body, in a cloud of sensations—the sensations of sitting and of breathing were more precise than ever.

Thoughts arose—and almost always passed away within the space of an in-breath or an out breath.

And my mind never wandered after my thoughts carrying me along as is usual.

I present. I was not entirely clear-minded for the entire twenty minutes, but I was present for more extended moments than ever before.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Morning routine, what and why

I started building my morning routine before I took the 30-day Stoic challenge. The challenge added to it. In my year-end retrospective, I wrote about how I’d gotten there.

Since the first of the year, I’ve improved my routine and also the way I manage it. I use Google Keep to keep track.

The night before

My morning routine starts the night. I have a checklist that I run through, so everything’s ready when I wake up.

Due to a magic keep feature, the checklist repeats every day at 8 PM.

Here’s the list. The annotations say why I do each thing:

•  Heat bed [so I can fall right to sleep]
•  Modafinil [put out, so it’s handy next morning]
•  Vasoline [keep CPAP from drying nostrils, also ready for next day]
•  Underwear, shirt, shoes [Ready for next day]
•  Coffee [Ready for next day]
•  Meditate [Better sleep, more insight]
•  Brush [Of course]
•  Pick music [I’ll play this in my shower in the AM-2 to 5 minutes long]
•  Charge phone [So it’s handy when I get up and charged]
•  Feet [Athlete’s foot, a constant challenge]
•  Ready for bed [Pajamas, and phone]

I have a phone with a vibrating alarm, set for 5:30

Lights out around 10;00 or 11:00. I usually wake up once or twice to pee.

And then, at 5:30

On Waking

At 5:30 my vibrating alarm goes off, and keep delivers this list to my phone.

I want to bounce out of bed and get going, but it’s usually more like a stagger.

Here’s the list:

•  Take modafinil [Which has been left out]
•  Cold shower [Playing the music I picked the prior night through water-resistant Bluetooth earbuds. 2 to 5 minutes, depending on mood and music]
•  Brush my teeth
•  Pee
•  Weigh myself [Same time every day, same empty bladder]
•  Dress
•  Athlete’s foot,
•  Clean up [because I make messes, and have to remember]

I’m done between 5:45 and 6:00 depending on how focused I am.

I’d like to do it in 15 minutes, then get it down to 5 + shower duration

After waking

At 5:45 Keep will have delivered me this list. I’ve set it up with links (motivated by writing this post) so that so I can go down the list, clicking links to other apps or pagers and then going back and completing this list.

•  Check calendar [Link to calendar]
•  Check todos [Link to Keep ToDo label group]
•  Gratitude [Hangout message to God to say thanks!]
•  Affirmations [Link to Keep Affirmations note]
•  Say hello [Hangouts to say hello to a couple of people]
•  Nag JL [WhatsApp to Nag my friend to write his book]
•  Meditate

My morning meditation is in two parts. I listen to a 10 minutes Sam Harris guided meditation, and then do a longer, timed meditation Culadasa style.
I emerge, clear-headed and ready to seize the day.

Seize the day

The next list takes care of my body

•  Burpees
•  Walk [up and down the driveway twice]
  •  Shave [while I’m walking]
•  Plan the day [Back to my todo list and make one for the day]
•  Set alarms [to check in and make sure I have not gone to sleep.

How it works

I’m rock solid on the first three lists, inconsistent, but getting better on the last one.

I’m still working on a reliable way to keep myself on task during the day, but I think I may have figured out what I need.

To be continued.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Breaking out

I’m in a rut. It’s a nice rut. A comfortable rut, but a rut. It might even be an upward-trending rut. But…

A rut is a rut.

Get out of the rut is not a goal. It’s a constraint or a criterion. It’s a condition to apply to a goal or strategy: “does this get me out of the rut.”

So what’s the goal? And what’s the plan for getting there.
My goal has two parts. What do I do and how does that impact the world.

What I do: First Draft

I do things, and I write about what I do.

The writing is essential. If I’m doing things and I’m not writing about what I do, then what I do is just about worthless. Not completely worthless, but almost. Because I’m relatively worthless.

Hear me out. I’m not down on myself. But in a world with 7.5 billion people, compared to the worth of the whole, each of us is not worth much. If I do something privately, then what I do might be valuable to me, it’s worthless to the world.

But I have potential! My potential impact on the world is unbounded. Look at Buddha. Look at Jesus. Look at Einstein, Freud, Marx, Hamilton. All nearly worthless individuals who made a difference to the world.

Writing is my chance to make what I do potentially worth a lot.

Writing is my chance to make what I do meaningful.
Jordan Peterson: “Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.”

RIght, Jordan. I’m signed up.

What I do: the second draft

I do stuff and produce a record of what I did and how I did.
It doesn’t have to be writing, but it has to be something.
Video, podcast, software, along with blog and book.

If I don’t produce something, then I’ve wasted that part of my life.

By Deutsch’s definition, every such product is an embodiment of knowledge.

So what I do is create embodied knowledge.

The meaning of my life

I’m a collector, organizer, disseminator, and creator of knowledge.

I’ve made collecting knowledge “for future use” an end in itself. Setting that goal has been an error.

In my analysis, the only reason to gather knowledge is to disseminate it. I can spread it in its original form, or organized with other knowledge, or as part of a new creation.

Collecting, organizing and creating knowledge may be satisfying, but they are not meaningful. Getting knowledge out where it can make the world better is part of what I define as meaningful.

Dissemination is the goal.

Are there other sources of meaning?

Yeah, I guess.

Solving a problem—which means applying knowledge to the conditions that create and maintain a problem is at least a little meaningful.

Having a conversation and communicating some knowledge is meaningful.

But the potential is limited.

Creating something and sharing knowledge is had unbounded potential meaning, but its actual meaning depends on what I do to spread that knowledge.

Do what is meaningful: Part II

This line of thought leads me somewhere I’m not happy to go.

Once I’ve produced something, then promoting it is one of the most meaningful things I can do.

What?

Writing is hard enough, but promoting what I’ve written?

Where do I even start?

Stay tuned.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Criteria for failure

Jordan Peterson says that every ideal is a judge. He says that goals establish the criteria for failure.

That’s why I’ve avoided setting well-defined goals.

In “Maps of Meaning” he argues that the unknown always produces fear.

It might seem logical, he says, that we should not react to the unknown until we have enough information to know how we should feel about it. It is unknown. It might be good. Or it might be bad.

But that’s not the way animals respond, including human animals.

Faced with the unknown, we react with fear, unless we have good reason to think otherwise.

Setting goals

I set vague goals—like “improving myself.” But that’s cheating. I can count anything that I do—even random shit that does not matter—as an improvement.

But if I announce goals—like blogging every day, or getting my weight below 175 in a month—then it’s pretty clear that I’ve failed.

And the bigger the goal, the bigger the failure.

Let’s be clear: a goal is not a wish, and it’s not a dream. It’s something that is not impossible to attain—just very hard.

Failure is hard. But so is an unprecedented success.

A writing goal

I want to write things. And I do. I want to write things that are read by people. And they are. I want to write things that are read by lots of people. How much is lots?

Last month this blog had 640 pageviews. I’d like it to be in the tens of millions.

My most popular post last month had 24 views. My most popular post of all time had 456. I want my most popular posts to be in the millions.

It’s possible that I could achieve that. There’s no reason—other than discomfort—that I couldn’t try.

I might fail.

Or I might succeed.

The threat of the unknown

Let’s suppose that I write a post that gets a million page views.

Let’s ignore the unknown and unfamiliar and scary things that I’d have to do to get a million page views. Let’s imagine success.

Success on that scale is unexplored territory—unknown and therefore frightening.

I know how I deal with my current life. I know how I’ve dealt with setbacks. I even know I’ve dealt with some pretty rough failures.

I pulled through. I behaved with less than perfect integrity, but I wasn’t a complete asshole.

But how would I deal with massive success?

I don’t know.

Other people have had had enormous successes and turned into assholes. I might be one of them. I’ve never been a huge success. I’ve never been tested. So how would I know?

Huge failure sucks, too. But failure to meet an audacious goal is not failure the way failure to keep something valuable.

I’m comfortable with modest failure and modest success. I’ve been there. I’m comfortable with failure to achieve a big goal.

But huge success? That’s the one that bothers me.

Running away

I can see it.

I’ve been writing and posting with regularity, and my anxiety has been growing. Unpublished drafts are building up. Ideas for content have been piling up.

This is not new. I see that it’s part of the pattern—the pattern of running away.

When I have small successes that betoken much greater success, I get anxious.

I start to run away.

I break the pattern and exchange the dangerous unknown for the comfortable—if annoying—known.

Can I change this one

I see the pattern. Perhaps I can change it. I can certainly be on guard.

My goals—the dangerous successes that I want to avoid—are getting clearer.

I’ll write about them in the next post.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Plans will fail

About a year ago I was working with Elsa as my personal coach. I’d make a list of things that I wanted to do, and at the end of the day, I’d discover that I hadn’t done what was on the list. I hadn’t wasted the day. I’d just done other stuff. That wasn’t what I wanted.

So we worked on making a plan so that I’d do what was on my list. We went over the plan again and again. We did premortems. Each time the plan got better. Finally, we had a plan that we couldn’t improve.

I said: “I’d be surprised if that failed.”

So what happened?

If failed, of course. But it failed in a surprising way.

So I was right. I was surprised when it failed.

But not the way I thought.

So we made another plan. That one lasted longer. Eventually, it failed.

A couple more iterations and the plan went on so long that when it failed, I didn’t care about it anymore. So I did not fix it. But I had learned how to fix it if I had cared.

You can’t always make fail-proof plans. Almost any plan that you make to teleport to Mars will fail. But you should at least think about failure modes.

And if there are too many, maybe you should plan on having a different goal.

Like astral projection to Mars.

Written with the help of
StackEdit,
Grammerly,
Markdown Here,
Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Recovering the dream

When I was a kid, I had a secret dream. One way to say it: I wanted to save the world. Another: I wanted to solve all the world’s problems.

I thought I was special. Who knows? Maybe I was. Perhaps I could realize my secret dream.

I got older. I realized how complicated life was. I could barely solve my own problems. No way I could solve the world’s.

I put my big dreams aside and had smaller ones. Find someone I loved. Get married. Have kids. Build a house. Put one foot in front of the other. Live to fight another day. Survive!

I had ideas for business. Ideas for software. I had ideas for making money. I succeeded at some. Failed at others.

I gave up a few times. Or mostly gave up.

I survived. I retired. I unretired. I re-retired. I re-unretired.

I never stopped learning.

My dreams were pretty modest. Write some blogs. FIgure some stuff out. Not change the world.

But deep inside, my big dreams were still alive.

Now, something is changing.

This year the big dreams are being reborn. Or some version of the big dreams. I don’t think I can solve the world’s problems. But I can aspire. I can give it my best.

Who knows how much I can accomplish?

Why set limits?

I’ve got another ten, maybe twenty, maybe even thirty years left. Perhaps I can make something big happen.

I don’t have to do something big myself. Maybe I can inspire someone who does something big.

Maybe I can’t even do that.

Maybe the best I can do is to inspire someone who inspires someone else who helps someone else who inspires someone else.

That would be pretty good.

I’ve been building my skills, trying small experiments, avoiding attention.

Every ideal is a judge, Jordan Peterson says. I goal sets the criteria for failure, he says.

I’ve avoided articulating my goals because I’ve been afraid of failure.

But you can’t make much of a difference if no one knows you exist.

Your ideas can’t have much impact if no one knows where to find them.

You can’t fail until you give up.

So this is the year when I come out of hiding.

I can’t change the world all alone in my room.

So this is the year.

This year will be different.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Raising the dead

I can remember the feeling. The present was nothing but agony. The future would be no different. Life was awful. I was a failure. There was only one way out: I had to die.

That’s my ten-year-old self.

I can see him, desolate. “I wish I were dead,” he wails. “I want to die,” he cries.

I see him tie a necktie around his neck. He tightens it, crying. He starts to black out.

He reflexively loosens the tie, still crying. Maybe he didn’t want to die as much as he thought he did. Perhaps a part of him wanted to die, and another part of him didn’t.

No matter.

He hates himself for his cowardice.

“You can’t do anything right,” he screams in his mind. “All you had to do was nothing, and you couldn’t even do that. You’re completely worthless. A failure.”

If he was cursing at the part of him that had loosened the knot, it has no answer.

That part of him is speechless in the face of such utter contempt and overwhelming misery and utter hopelessness.

It makes no argument. It offers no excuses.

That’s some of what’s inside me. Maybe something like that is in other people, too, but certainly in me.

Not just the 10-year-old

It’s not just the troubled ten-year-old inside me. I’m full of miserable teenaged selves. They wish for their death. For the end of their intolerable existence.

The other day in an IFS session I woke up and saw the ghosts of those tormented, failed, embittered Past Selves within me—dead, and yet undead.

They had not sacrificed willingly for the sake of a better Future Self. They had died regretful, resentful, angry—in the desperate hope of oblivion.

They died cursing themselves and all of existence. They died full of self-loathing and self-contempt. Something else carried on, worked hard on improving, and eventually became the self I had become the day I discovered the living dead.

The irony: those past selves reviled themselves for not killing themselves, unfairly because they succeeded.

They were dead, but not dead the way they had hoped to be.

And as Miracle Max says, not completely dead.

It seems that a Present Self can sacrifice itself for the sake of a better Future Self, or it can die unable to bear its existence. Either way, a Future Self arises. In one case the Past Self is alive, integrated within it; in the other, the Past Self haunts it like a ghost—a sad, miserable creature, dead and undead.

The ghost remains until it finished its unfinished business.

Talking to ghosts

I’ve been talking to some of those ghostly selves, those undead Past Me’s. “You succeeded,” I tell them. “You wanted to die, and you died.

“And if you want to stay dead, that’s fine. But you’ve got choices now that you didn’t have then.”

They’re relieved to know they didn’t fail utterly: that they wanted to die and they succeeded. Oddly, they are relieved.

They’re happy to know what has become of what they once had been. They are pleased to meet me, the person who evolved.

I tell them that I’m grateful—that I appreciate their suffering and the fact that they died to get me here.

They are relieved to know they did not live their lives in vain.

Relieved of their burdens, freed from the past they wake up.

Related

• Self-discipline and sacrifice
• On sacrifice
• The slippery slope of sacrifice
• Sacrifice to realize potential
• The price of progress is death
• Dying thoughts of a former self

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Consciousness, Awareness, Attention, Intention

I’ve been discovering how fascinating my mind is. Really. It’s fascinating.

I’ve looked inward from time to time. But I’ve never said: “Wow! That’s fascinating.”

My guides have made the difference. First, Sam Harris with “The Waking Up Course.” Then, Culadasa (John Yates) with “The Mind Illuminated.”

Sam told me that I’d also find it fascinating—as fascinating as the stars in the night sky and as fascinating as the details of the structure of the universe that are revealed by powerful telescopes.

That was a new idea. And correct, once I looked.

The guided tour with Sam

Each ten minute guided meditation in the Waking Up Course is a Sam Harris tour of my “field of consciousness.” We visit the now-familiar objects of consciousness—the sensations of breathing, the sounds that arise and pass away, the darkness behind closed eyes, the “cloud of sensation” that is the body, the thoughts arising and passing away.

My guide points out details that I might have missed on earlier visits. Sometimes he points to new objects.

He proposes new experiences or encourages me to repeat familiar ones more attentively. Every tour is interesting.

Sam reminds me that everything that I can experience arises in my field of consciousness. There’s no experience other than that.

Consciousness does not appear in my head. It’s the reverse. Consciousness first, head second. My head must arise in consciousness for me to have a head.

He reminds me that there is nothing that I need to do to make something arise in consciousness. Sounds appear in consciousness; I don’t make them appear. When my eyes are open visual phenomena appear in consciousness; when my eyes are closed, a dark field—not entirely black arises. I don’t make them appear.

Thoughts appear in consciousness; I don’t make them appear. I do seem to be able to change the kinds of thoughts that arise—a bit. I just decided I’d like some thoughts about sunny tropical places. Images appeared. The names of places appeared. I didn’t choose them. I just established a context.

I have partial control of my attention. I can intend that I pay attention to an object of consciousness and my attention will move there. Sometimes my attention moves without my intention. Sometimes I can’t stop paying attention to something.

All fascinating to observe.

The unguided tour, Culadasa style

I follow my daily ten-minute guided tour with an unguided tour. I started with ten minutes, and I’m now at 40. I use Culadasa’s six-step process to prepare me, and four-step process to guide me. I reread his instructions from time to time.

The six steps

Before I start the session, I take these steps:

1. Motivation: I have clearly in mind why I want to be doing this
2. Goal: I set a clear goal for this particular meditation session
3. Expectations: I remind myself to have reasonable expectations
4. Diligence: I remind myself to use the entire period to make progress toward the goal. Periodically in the session, I’ll remind myself to be diligent.
5. Distractions: I look for things that might distract me and take action to prevent them. I pull the batteries out of the wireless handset in the room where I meditate; I turn my phone on DND. I make sure people know that I am personally on DND.
6. Posture: I find a comfortable posture before I start.

The four steps

Once I start the meditation session, I follow these steps:

1. Become aware of the present. Let go of thoughts of the past and the future
2. Move attention to the body. Be aware of how it feels
3. Move attention to the sensations of breathing
4. Move attention to the sensations of breathing in a particular, small area

I take as much time as I need to do the four steps. If my mind becomes unsettled in one stage, I might move back to an earlier one.

Attention

The goal is “stable attention” and heightened “peripheral awareness.”

Culadasa distinguishes between these two and defines “mindfulness” as “an optimal balance between attention and awareness.”

Attention and awareness are two different ways of knowing the world. Attention singles out some small part of the field of conscious awareness to analyze and interpret it. Peripheral awareness provides the overall context for conscious experience.

Stable attention Is the ability to [intentionally] direct and sustain the focus of attention, and control the scope of attention.

Intentionally directed and sustained attention means spontaneous movements of attention stop.

Intention is a big deal. You can’t program the unconscious mind directly, but you can get it to reprogram itself by intention. The way you become skilled at a sport is by going through the motions, with attention and intention. Simply going through the motions is not enough.

Repeating simple tasks with a clear intention can reprogram unconscious mental processes. This can completely transform who you are as a person.

So you use intention to stabilize your intention. And at the same time, you use intention to expand your peripheral awareness. In my sessions, I will periodically remind myself of my intention: focus attention on the sensations of breathing in a narrow area while keeping my attention as wide as possible.

Peripheral awareness:

… involves a general awareness of everything our senses take in. Peripheral awareness is only minimally conceptual. It is open and inclusive, as well as holistic. That is, it’s concerned with the relationships of objects to each other and to the whole.

What can be aware of? A second ago I was aware that the Pats were playing the Chargers. I wasn’t aware of the computer I was using to watch or the room where I watched. And I wasn’t even vaguely aware that I was on a little blue planet 93 million miles from the nuclear furnace that provides us with energy in a vast universe 14.75 billion years old. Now I’m vaguely aware.

Right now I’m aware the words that I’m typing, aware of my fingers doing the typing, aware of the computer I’m using, aware of the Pats’ game streaming in the background, and so on.

The fundamental technique in TMI is to focus attention and then expand peripheral awareness.

It’s fascinating to notice that I can move my attention around; that it will sometimes move spontaneously; that many things arise and pass away in peripheral awareness; that there are many things I might become aware of; that the power of intention.

Reflection

It’s useful to meditate, and it’s helpful to reflect (or maybe meditate) on meditation.

Sometimes, when I’m meditating, I think “Wow! I’m going to have to remember that and write it down!” Sometimes I think: “Maybe I should stop meditating and write it down because I’m likely to forget.”

Then I realize that these are just thoughts arising in consciousness.

I move my attention from those intriguing thoughts to the sensations of the breath.

And spread my awareness as wide as I can.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammerly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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