Because I keep forgetting...

I’ve written about this before, using some of these, taken from Sam Harris’s talk “The Logic of Practice” from the “The Waking Up Course.” I’m just going to slow it down and unpack what he says. Because it’s vital that I remember it. If it helps you, too, great. But I’m writing this to remind me. Because once in a while, I do read what I write.

Why meditate?

The basic logic is quite simple. The quality of your mind determines the quality of your life.

The quality of your mind doesn’t “influence the quality of your life.” It doesn’t “affect it.” It determines it. Really? That’s a pretty strong statement.

What if you’re living in horrible circumstances. Wouldn’t that determine the quality of your life?

No.

Some people are content in the midst of real deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world.

If you live in a concentration camp, or you’re dying a painful no one’s going to blame you for being miserable. But that doesn’t mean you have to be miserable. Some people manage not to be.

Likewise, if you live in safety and abundance, you’re likely to have a pleasant life. Yet some people are miserable. Some are so miserable that they kill themselves.

Consciousness is a prerequisite

But everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad situations because changing how you respond to the world is often as good as changing the world.

Really? Changing your response is as good?

No. Not always.

I assure you that you’re about to be crushed, then changing how you would respond to being crushed is not as good as avoiding being crushed.

But if someone says something that annoys you, then changing how you respond is just as good as changing what they say. Maybe even better.

To change or not to change

There’s nothing wrong with changing the world (for the better.)

There’s nothing virtuous about changing your mind so that you can be exploited without complaining.

But changing the world and changing your mind are not exclusive options.

If you choose to change the world, you can do it with a mind that’s full of anger and bitterness and resentment, or you can do the same things with a mind that’s got equanimity.

If you choose to accept unpleasant circumstances, you can do it with a mind that’s full of frustration, sadness, and impotence—or you can accept them with equanimity.

Avoiding suffering

Rather than trying to change the world in each moment, there is another move open to you. You can look more closely at what you’re doing with your own mind, and actually cease to respond to life in ways that produce needless suffering for yourself and those around you.

The insight gained through meditation is that all your suffering is needless. Pain may be unavoidable, but suffering, you learn, is optional.

When we’re lost in thought, there are certain things we tend not to notice about the nature of our mind. For instance, every thought or feeling you’ve ever had, good or bad, has arisen and then passed away. The anger you felt yesterday, or a year ago, isn’t here anymore. And if it arises in the next moment, based on your thinking about the past, it will once again pass away when you are no longer thinking about it.

So whatever is troubling you now will pass away.

This is a profoundly important truth about the mind. And it can be absolutely liberating to understand it deeply.

I’m good at this, right?

No.

I don’t understand it deeply.

I forget from day to day—as yesterday’s post and the one from the day before make clear.

I don’t expect this blog post to bring anyone to understand it deeply—including me.

But here’s the thing: I do understand it.

I need to keep reminding myself of the fact that everything in consciousness that I have experienced so far has arisen and that everything—except the present moment—has passed away.

Yesterday I was whining about the difficulty of—stuff being difficult. It had arisen, and I engaged with it and kept manufacturing the discontent. Until I stopped.

Today, with a clearer mind, I see that what was in my mind was yesterday was—just something in my mind. It had arisen, and if I had let it pass away, I’m confident that it would have.

Anger needs to be manufactured

Sam says this about anger:

…if you’re able to pay clear attention to the arising of an emotion like anger, rather than merely thinking about why you have every right to be angry, it actually becomes impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments at a time.

It’s the same for any mental state.

If you think you can stay angry for a day, or even an hour, without continually manufacturing this emotion, by thinking without knowing that you’re thinking, you are mistaken.

You mean it’s that easy?

No. It’s not. Once an emotion takes root, it’s hard to stop manufacturing it. That’s because you can’t control your attention.

Really? How does that work?

If an emotion arises—say anger, or fear, it’s for a reason. And the reason, like the emotion itself, is just something that’s appeared in consciousness.

Maybe someone said something that you found offensive. It appeared in consciousness because they said it and you heard it. Say you’re afraid because you heard a strange sound at night. What you heard has arisen in consciousness because you heard it.

Now that person is no longer saying that offensive thing to you. And you no longer hear that strange sound. But to stay angry or fearful, your mind has to remain stuck on something. Maybe it was what prompted the feeling in the first place. Perhaps it’s the feeling itself. If you could—without effort— transfer your attention elsewhere, perhaps to some pleasant interaction, or something neutral, like the sensations of breathing, then the fear or anger would go away.

My experience (which I keep forgetting.) It does.

It’s testable

As Sam says:

This is an objective claim about the mechanics of your own subjectivity. And I invite you to test it. And meditation is the tool you would use to test it.

The theory is: you learn to control your attention and your awareness; you learn to observe what’s going on in your mind, and things change.

The practice is: you practice.

This practice has been shown to produce long-lasting changes and attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception. And these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.

So here’s a reminder for me the next time I’m stuck in some undesirable mental state: it’s just a mental state. It arose, and if I don’t keep manufacturing it, it will pass away.

The quality of my mind determines the quality of my life

Got that, Mike?

Having a low-quality life-experience?

I know what to do.

Just remember: the most valuable quality of my mind is my knowledge that its quality determines the quality of my life.

Recover that, and all will go well.

​

Discomfort is a bug and a feature.

Once again I’ve arrived near the end of the day with lots to write about and nothing written. And today I’ve fallen into whining about it.

“I’m wasting my life,” I whine.

I want to write.

But I don’t just want to write. I want writing to be easy. Some parts are easy. Some are not. I want all of it to be easy.

When something isn’t easy sometimes I go looking for an easy way (as I wrote yesterday) and sometimes (like today), I whine.

The injustice of it all!

It should be easy.

Or should it?

If something is automatic, an automaton does it. AutoWriter writes. I don’t. And things are not easy or hard for AutoWriter. It’s a machine.

If it’s not automatic, then it’s probably not easy. If it were, I would have automated it.

But if I’m fully present it’s neither easy nor is it difficult. Neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. If I’m fully present, I’m beyond duality.

Discomfort is a feature. It means I’m not on automatic.

But it’s also a bug. It means I’m not fully present.

​

The hard way is the easy way

I’m always looking for ways to improve myself and the world. Easy ways. Today I realized what a mistake I’ve been making.

Easy ways don’t work.

Lifting weight the easy way

Suppose I wanted to lift 100 lbs. I could just bend down and lift it. That would work.

But that would be hard. Instead, I’ll look for an easy way.

In the old days, before the internet, I’d sit down and think and think and think about easier ways. I’d think instead of lifting. But now that I’ve got the internet I can do better.

Now I can search the web for ways to lift with less effort. Great! Here’s a guy who’s got a blog about lifting heavy things. I’ll read everything he’s written about that. And about everything else he’s ever written.

And here’s another one. And another.

Whoops! Time for bed. Well, I can look again tomorrow. I’m sure there’s an easier way to lift than “just pick it the fuck up.”

Good morning! Sure enough! Here are ten different ways. Now, which one should I choose?

I bet someone’s got a blog about choosing the best easy way to lift. Now I can research figuring out how to decide which way to lift is best.

Weeks later, I still haven’t lifted anything.

Meanwhile, I could have just fucking lifted it.

Avoiding what’s uncomfortable

But that would be uncomfortable. True, research takes time. And research might be hard for some people. But not for me. Research is easy, and it’s better than lifting a weight, or writing a blog post or just about any fucking thing.

I love doing research. So I’ll always do research, looking for a better way.

And best yet, while I’m doing the research, I can tell myself I’m making progress.

I am making progress, aren’t I?

Working out makes lifting easy

Here’s another way to make lifting 100 lbs easy: I could go to the gym and work out until I can lift 200 lbs. Getting to 200 lbs might be super-hard; it might take every bit of my strength. But once I can lift 200 lbs lifting 100 lbs would be easy.

Of course, I’m not going to do that, because going to the gym every day would be hard. And I’m going to look for an easy way. So I’ll do some research about finding an easy way to go to the gym.

It’s like I said in my post “Whatever it takes” it gives the illusion that I’m trying to get shit done when what I’m really trying to do is avoid discomfort.

I want to write, but it’s hard. I keep looking for “the easy way to write.” I’ll spend days researching so that I have lots to write about. I’ll spend hours writing early drafts, so it looks like I’m making progress.

But I’m not.

The hard part of writing anything is finishing.

Fine. Then I’ll look for the easy way to finish.

The easy way

No such thing.

If there’s an easy way to do any of this, it’s this: I have to do it the hard way over and over.

If I do it mindlessly, it may get easier as I build my skills.

If I do it mindfully, it will probably get easier because I’ll see the patterns to the way I work and I’ll see ways to make improvements.

If there is an easy way, the hard way is the way to get to the easy way. And in the meanwhile, I get shit done.

If there is no easy way, the hard way is the way to get shit done.

I’ve stumbled across this idea before: I’ll do whatever it takes to find an easier way. And I’ll do the hard stuff, and I realize that I need to get out of my comfort zone.

Now it’s clearer.

The hard way is the easy way.

​

Mindscapes and mindtravel

Think of our minds as vast landscapes. There are beautiful places and ugly ones.

Let’s call it a mindscape.

At any moment we are somewhere in our mindscapes. Call that our viewpoint.

Most often we hold a single viewpoint, but we can sometimes have more than one.

Once we’ve taken a viewpoint, we can hold on to it and travel.

Or we can move from viewpoint to viewpoint, and we move through our mindscapes.

Exploring our mindscapes

Most of our mindscape exploration is in the area near where we find ourselves. We move from viewpoint to nearby viewpoint.

We spend most of our lives moving between familiar places in our mindscape following familiar paths.

Sometimes we travel to new places, but most places we visit are like the places we’ve been to before. Most of the paths we travel are like ones we’ve traveled before.

Sometimes we climb to places with beautiful vistas spread out before us.

Sometimes we’ll descend into dark, uncomfortable places.

Sometimes we move across our mindscape on our own.

Sometimes it’s as though we’re being pushed or pulled to change our viewpoint.

We spend most of our lives in familiar parts of our mindscape.

Mindtravel

Sometimes we find ourselves teleported. One second we’re in one place, the next, someplace completely different. I’ll call that “mindtravel.”

We can mindtravel instantly across both space and time. Sometimes we mindtravel to familiar places and other times to unfamiliar.

Trauma mind-travels us from somewhere familiar and safe to someplace strange and terrible. Once trauma has mindtraveled us to some awful place we have to find a way back.

In a terrible place, we look for a route to safety or at least something we can rely on. If we find nothing at first, we keep looking—because what else can we do?

Eventually, we find something. It might be a bit of wisdom that we’ve used in the past. It might be a friend—or the memory of a friend. We can use that to find our way back to the surface.

Once I found myself in the darkest and most desolate part of my mindscape that I had ever experienced. I searched for something I could rely on and found only this: “I can kill myself and make this end.” Oddly, the thought comforted me. It sustained me as I slowly found my way back.

I’ve also mindtravelled to places that I found spectacular.

Mindtravel while sleeping

I go to sleep. And when I wake up, I almost always find I’ve moved somewhere else in my mindscape.

I usually wake up near where I went to sleep. But not always.

If I go to sleep tired and the rest has been refreshing I often wake up somewhere that’s brighter, warmer, and at a higher elevation than where I went to sleep.

If I’m anxious when I go to sleep, I might wake up somewhere darker and colder. I might wake up in a small depression or a deep ditch. What follows then is a long slow journey to a better place.

Intentionally mindtravelling

Frequently mindtravelling to cold, dark places has driven me to learn ways to return to normalcy faster than by the usual slow, painful climb.

I’ve learned how to intentionally mindtravel.

I found that I had a few landmark locations—times and places in my mindscape that were calm and safe. I found that that I could travel to them if I needed to.

I had a few, but writing this post, I’ve added to the list.

I was about twelve and walking our family dog and looking up at the stars on a cold clear night. I can go there in an instant.

There’s a place in the darkness of space that I unexpectedly traveled to when my Scientology auditor asked me a particular question. I can jump there.

There’s a moment in Chilling Street Cottage in England just after Bobbi arrived; I’m looking down at her and thinking how beautiful she is. Blink. I’m there.

I can go to Cairo very early the first morning after we had arrived there; to a moment when I was walking through the dark lit by sodium lamps, hearing the sounds of the muezzins reflected off the mist-shrouded great pyramid.

I can go to the promenade of the Quantum of the Seas when I realized that self was an illusion.

Practice makes perfect

When you start to intentionally mindtravel, you might not be able to go very far.

You might find you snap back to where you came from.

But it’s a learnable skill.

Make your list of destinations and practice mindtravelling when you don’t have to.

You’ll be good at doing it when you need to.

​

Passover journey

Maybe it was just a coincidence and what happened today had nothing to do with my conversation with God this morning.

“I don’t do coincidence,” God says.

OK, so maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. Anyway, here’s my journey.

I started out with agape, the Greek word for love. Biblical scholars translate it as love (correct, in my view) or charity (close, but misleadingly wrong.) I wrote about it earlier here. I looked it up agape today in Wikipedia here.

From there, I saw a link to Chesed, a Hebrew word given the association of kindness and love. So I went there.

Why did I go there? I’m not quite sure.

“I am,” God says.

In its positive sense, the word is used of kindness or love between people, of piety of people towards God as well as of love or mercy of God towards humanity. It is frequently used in Psalms in the latter sense, where it is traditionally translated “lovingkindness” in English translations.

Lovingkindness is the goal of metta meditation.

In Jewish theology it is likewise used of God’s love for the Children of Israel, and in Jewish ethics, it is used for love or charity between people. Chesed in this latter sense of “charity” is considered a virtue on its own, and also for its contribution to tikkun olam (repairing the world).

I’d never learned about chesed or tikkun olam, but I remember reading about tikkun olam in Scott Alexander’s book, UNSONG.

So onward I went to learn about tikkun olam.

tikkun olam is the idea that Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare but also for the welfare of society at large.

Bingo!

I had absorbed that idea through my skin. That’s what I wrote about in Mortality 101, and in What matters?

That’s my goal. To do as much as I can to make a better world.

I never thought that being one of the Chosen People ™ gave me special privileges. It gave me special responsibilities—which, to be honest, I failed to live up to. (Sorry God. And sorry for ending a sentence with a preposition.)

“Your first apology accepted,” says God. “As to the second, stop paying attention to grammar Nazis.”

Some Jews believe that performing mitzvot will create a model society among the Jewish people, which will in turn influence the rest of the world. By perfecting themselves, their local Jewish community or the state of Israel, the Jews set an example for the rest of the world.

So here’s my take. That plan didn’t work. The world was not repaired.

So God tried again. “Look,” I imagine God saying. “I gave you some rules to follow, and you’re doing a crap job of following them. So let me give you an example of the way I’d like you to behave. I’m not going to provide you with a mere example. I’m going to provide you with a completely over-the-top you-can-never do this example of a good human being.

“If people would just act the way that Jesus did (What would Jesus do, anyone?) that would set an example, and the world would be repaired.”

“That’s pretty much what I was thinking,” God says.

When I went through my Christian Science phase, I took some of their ideas as my own. Jesus is not the only Son of God. ™ I am too. And that doesn’t make me special. We are all sons and daughters of God. Of course, the Lord’s Prayer ™ tells us that. It’s not addressed to “Jesus’s Father,” but “Our Father.”

It’s not egotistical. It’s not “give me this day my daily bread” But “give us.” Not “forgive me,” but “forgive us.” Not “lead me not,” but “lead us not.”

Are people taught to pray that way? I wasn’t. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” Not ours. Mine. Mine. No wonder things are fucked up.

“I ignore all selfish prayers,” God says. “You’d think people would figure that out based on how often I grant them. And you’d think that having given an example of a proper prayer, people would get how to do it.

“So far Plan J has not worked,” I say to God.

“It hasn’t,” God says.

From here I went on to music.

I hadn’t even realized it was Passover.

That’s the subject of another post.

​

Conversations with God

As one of the Chosen People (™) I grew up having a special, personal relationship with God. Or a god.

That god was a childish cartoon version of the Jewish god. I talked to him—I guess it was a him. And he talked to me.

That was nice for me, as a kid.

I tried to be good because I believed that God was watching me. And when bad things happened to me—as they did from time to time—I thought God was teaching me a lesson.

The God that I believed in was not a punishing God. He was a loving God—drawn from the Christian tradition more than the Jewish. When bad things happened, I always asked “What am I supposed to learn from this,” because God wanted me to learn.

I still ask that question.

The father of one family I babysat for was a Sunday school teacher. Their bookshelf contained a set of books called “The Interpreter’s Bible.” Each book in the set analyzed a different book of the Bible. I started with Matthew, read it all the way to—not very far. Maybe I finished it. Maybe I skipped around. Who knows? I was a kid. But I read it far enough to know that there was a lot of room for interpretation; there were a lot of questionable translations from Greek to English.

I admired Jesus—although I knew he could not have been the Messiah. For one thing: there was no peace on Earth; too many people had killed and tortured others in his name. This was a disqualifier.

For another: we Jews were still waiting for the Messiah to come. So he couldn't have been the one.

Finally, and most important, because I wanted to be the Messiah. And I thought that God might choose me.

It was possible. I had the necessary qualifications. I was Jewish. I had a direct relationship with God. I was willing to suffer to save the world.

Well, maybe my willingness to sacrifice didn’t extend to a painful death, but I was willing to experience a fair amount of discomfort if that was what it took to end war and starvation and suffering.

Then I discovered sex and wasn’t so sure that I would be able to stay in the running. Or want to. To make matters worth what I am calling “the discovery of sex,” to make it sound all grown up, was really “the discovery of masturbation.”

That was guilt-inducing. And possibly disqualifying. Could you jerk off and still be the Messiah?

I also discovered other things about myself that made me doubt my divinity. Or at least to be less confident.

Somewhere in my twenties I got pissed off at God and stopped talking to him--just like I stopped talking to my parents for a dozen years when they pissed me off. I can’t remember what God did that pissed me off, but I have a clear memory of being in my car near Omaha Nebraska and deciding to have nothing more to do with God. Maybe he didn’t grant some wish. Or perhaps he allowed the war in Viet Nam to keep going.

Whatever it is, God and I were quits for a while. 

I was that kind of person, back then. Angry and vindictive—while still imagining I had the makings of a Messiah.

There followed a long spiritual journey that I’ll write more about unless I die first. It had led me from Judaism (Reform or Judaism Lite) to Christianity, and Christian Science, and several flirtations with Buddhism, then Scientology, and Radical Reductionism, then more Buddhism.

Even when I was pissed at God, I never entirely lost faith--in something.

Eventually, I made my peace with myself, my parents, and ultimately with God.

And now I’m talking to God again. And He or She or It is talking to me.

“I don’t believe in You,” I said to God one time, deferentially capitalizing the word “You.”

“Do you think I care?” God asked. “As long you try to live a good life and try to make the world a better place, I don’t give a flying f**k what you believe.”

That’s the kind of God I talk with.

Might not be your idea of God, but it’s mine. At least right now.

​

Faith, hope, and love

Sometimes kids want their parents to tell them something like: “I love you, and everything is going to be alright.”

What do you say when a kid wants you to say that?

We’re all kids inside. What do you say when a seeming adult wants you to say that?

To be perfectly rational you’d have to say something like this:

“Well, I mostly love you. Or at least I believe I love you. But research has shown that people can mislead themselves about their own beliefs, not to mention misleading other people. So I might not.

But assuming that I firmly believe that love you. Psychological research provides evidence that our feelings are always ambivalent and influenced by past events. So I think it’s likely that I am still a little upset about your behavior the last few days, not to mention prior days. I want to be over it, but I know that I can’t get over things as fast as I would like.

“As to how things will go? I think that most things will go mostly right. But everything? No way I can say that. We live in an uncertain and chaotic universe. No one can ever know with perfect certainty what’s going to happen.

However we don’t need perfect knowledge to live in the world. Based on my Bayesian priors about how the things that you are worried about are likely to go, I think that they will turn out in a way that is acceptable to you, and likely better than that.”

“But everything? There is a high likelihood that somewhere in the vastness of universe a sun is going nova right now and if there are any conscious beings within hundreds of light years, things are about to go very badly for them.

“Sorry, but that’s the best I can do.

Once when things had gotten really, really tough, I asked Bobbi to tell me “I love you and things are going to be alright.” I had to tell her: “You don’t have to believe it; Or even mean it; I just need to hear you say it,” and she did. It happened again. And again.

Eventually, I didn’t need the qualifiers.

More than once and I’ve said it to her.

And I’ve said it to our kids.

And friends.

If someone wants you to say “I love you and everything is going to be alright,” I think the right answer is to say it.

Daniel challenged me to say why. I'm glad he did. I learned that I knew something that I didn't know that I knew.

Here’s the why that I wrote:

You can answer such a request in the framework of facts, or the framework of faith, and love.

The factual answer is the horrible one at the start of this post. Or something like it.

The faith and love answer is: “I love you, and everything is going to be alright.”

If asked: “How can you be sure?” the factual answer is: “I can’t be sure. No one can be sure about anything. But I believe it is likely to be true.”

The faith and love answer is: “I am sure. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

Sometimes the right framework is facts.

Sometimes it’s faith and love.

If someone asked me: “How do you know which one to use?”

My answer would be:

“I just know.”

---

I wrote the draft version of my answer to him from my head and my heart. It's been edited, but the gist is the same: faith and love as an alternative to facts.

It reminded me of something that seemed relevant.

A little Googling found the reference:

I Corinthians 13:13

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

So closed with this:

I have long been guided by reason. I have tried to be.

But more and more I am guided by faith, hope, and love as well as reason. [Ed: I forgot about hope in the draft. But I’ve written about it before.]

Faith, hope, and love.

So what is love?

I Corinthians 13:4-7 does a poetic job of saying what love is:

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

That’s something to aspire to.

I certainly do.

---

Nerd note: the King James Version uses “charity” instead of “love.” This is fortunate because otherwise the lyrics to the Don Cornell Song “The Bible tells me so” don’t work:

Have faith, hope and charity
That’s the way to live successfully
How do I know, the Bible tells me so.

But Nerds Never Rest(TM)

The word being translated from the Greek is agape.

According to my understanding, bolstered by [this Wikipedia article] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agape), it’s better translated as love, Don Cornell to the contrary.

So faith, hope, and love.

And the greatest of these is love.

​

What I believe

I believe that what I believe determines what I do.

I believe that if I am not doing something that I believe that I want to do (writing, for example) that there must be one or more limiting beliefs in the way.

I believe that if I found and removed the limiting beliefs, then what I did would change.

I believe that I can believe anything—if only for a moment.

I believe that I can maintain some beliefs effortlessly and I can maintain others only with effort.

I believe apart from the effort to maintain some beliefs, changing what I do by changing my beliefs would be effortless.

I believe that it might be possible to maintain more beliefs effortlessly

I believe that I know things that I can’t articulate.

I believe that I can improve any part of my life, at any moment, by taking an inventory of what I believe, emphasizing the beliefs that are helpful, changing or removing beliefs that are unhelpful, and adding beliefs that would be helpful.

I have been doing that for most of the morning.

I believe my life has already improved.

I believe that this post is evidence.

I believe your life might improve if you did something like this.

I hope you do and I hope that it does.

If you so, and it does, I would like to hear about it.

Anyway, I believe that I would.

I believe that there’s a lot more to this idea than what I’ve written here.

I believe (and predict) that I am going to write some posts unpacking this idea.

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