Because most of your life is the journey most of your life is a process of solving problems.

It is not and never will be the condition of basking in the absence of all problems. You will always have something to do.

So the frame of mind in which you do these things, will determine the quality of your life.

Above all, there’s one mistake you cannot afford to make:

You can’t wait until you solve your problems to be happy.

Sam Harris

Some say our attention is our most precious resource, yet it’s challenging because it’s easy for our attention to scatter and to be captured. The reasons are often beyond our control – an unfinished work conversation, the latest news, life …

One way I manage my attention is by emptying my mind. Imagine your attention as a cup filled to the brim with something. All you think about is that something. Meditation is like tipping the cup to pour some out, making room for new things to pay attention to.

Another way is writing. Writing is like a flashlight in a dark room. It illuminates what’s holding my attention hostage. Writing allows me to think through things and loosen things up a little bit. Sometimes, as the light reveals previously unseen parts of the room, the grind of writing sometimes let me find new focal points for my attention.

(Yes, I am writing this because I need to refocus my attention!)

Finally, consider crop rotation as a method to get a grip of our attention. Just as farmers rotate crops to regenerate depleted fields, we can plant new crops to reset our attention. Engaging in reading, exercising, or other long form activities, rather than fleeting content like short videos or social media, is like planting a new crop in my attention field. It slowly loosens the grip of whatever is capturing my attention.

How do you manage your attention?

(picture: Gerard K. O’Neill’s detailed concepts for human settlements in space)

Throughout this time, I tried all kinds of apps, such as Insight Timer, Calm, Ten Percent Happier, Waking Up, Oak. I went to a 10 day silent retreat, virtual retreats, even in-app retreats. I experienced Vipassana, Metta, Maraṇasati, Mantra … 

Meditation was a habit, a nuisance, a sanctuary, a chore. I never stopped and resumed and paused and started. I was never clear and concerned and convinced and confused.

In the end, after 10 years of sitting and doing nothing, I came down with 4 things that I have found most meaningful:

1. “Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable”, and “not mind what happens”

2. Focus on doing the next most appropriate thing

3. “Not knowing is most intimate”

4. Life is practicing. So, “begin again”

In this particular interview, he shared how he looked at mindfulness. I used to consider mindfulness a term that encompasses all meditative practices. He disagreed and posited that mindfulness should be an ecology of practices. These are practices that work on our ability to see more clearly, perceive more broadly, and then intuit more cohesively.

Specifically, he included three things in the ecology of mindfulness practices:

1. Meditative practices
2. Contemplative practices
3. Mindful movements practices

The meditative practices are to inspect the “lens” we have on our experiences. These lens typically include emotions and sensations. Meditative practices work on our ability to notice these “lens,” and to work on seeing things without these lens, and then integrate this realization back to our day to day life, when we have the “lens” back on. In other words, we meditate to see how feelings arise and change our awareness. We meditate to accept them, label them, and experience how to be with these lens.

Contemplative practices work on our ability to look at ourselves from a 3rd person perspective, a wider perspective. These are practices to see the identities of us, and identities we assign to ourselves. For example, one of the contemplative practices is to ask, “what’s within our control and what’s outside of our control.” This question requires us to step away from the identity of us being the main antagonist of the situation, while at the same time investigate this antagonist’s circumstances and options. What’s in his control and what’s not?

Lastly, mindful movement practices work on using the rest of the machinery of our body to “gather information” about us and everything around us. The first two practices work on the brain, and the 3rd practice work on the entire body. These movement practices need to make us move consciously. Dance, Tai Chi, martial arts, are example of such practices. These practices have clear definition of form, movements, and effort. It also involves the brain, the lungs, and the body. It’s both thinking, perceiving, breathing, moving, feeling and not doing all of the above. It’s so woo woo I cannot not love it!

I am glad John provided such clear ideas of how to live more mindfully. I am eager to practice. I have large voids that I do not know how to fill, and so I am grateful there are ways to make this void useful – the urge to fill this void has become the single most tenacious source of motivation for me to try and live better. I suppose that’s the best way, the only way, to make use of this void (contemplative practice in action).

Here are my notes from the episode:

Lex and John 7Sep2022
https://pca.st/episode/6af11efc-d005-4294-8665-6c23361987e9

• Sin is failing to love wisely
• Bullshit is triggered salience without triggering reflective truth seeking
• Meaning is being. Being is non being. It is participating.
• An ecology of practices: opponent processing. Check and balances:
  Mindfulness is both meditative and contemplative practices. Meditation is stepping back and looking at, reflecting upon. Contemplation is looking through, deeply into. It’s both looking at the glasses and looking through the glasses. Framed awareness to improve self regulation and insights. It is both to break an inappropriate frame and make and realize a new frame (insights).
• If you just do contemplation you can suffer from inflation and projective fantasy. If you just do meditation you could suffer from withdrawals, spiritual bypassing, avoiding reality. You need to cycle through both.
• The integrated practices:
  • Meditative: Vipassana – the Len is the sensations and emotions. Labeling the process and the distractions.
  • Meta contemplative practice: stoicism. wake up from constantly assuming an identity and assigning an identity. It’s meta because it’s looking at ourselves from a bigger higher wider perspective. You have to do it step by step.
  • Mindful Movement. Flow induction – tai chi:
    • flow state – slightly beyond your abilities. Best experience and best performance. It needs clear information, immediate feedback/no time lag response between your actions and the environment, failure must matter. They report oneness because of the clarity of info and feedback. On going sense of discovery. It feels effortless because there is no effort in guessing and wondering. Realness. Participation of Grace. Super salient. Implicit learning. Learning outside of deliberate locus. You don’t know how you came up with that knowledge but you know you came up with that knowledge. This is intuition. Explicit learning removes all the adaptiveness of implicit learning.
• What do we need to do explicitly to facilitate implicit learning? Create an environment that helps us distinct causations from correlations. How ? Experimental environments, where variables are not confounding, too variable, ambiguous, hypothesis can be falsified.
• Depression is anti flow.

When is the last time you swim in the ocean?

Or went camping?

When is the last time you took a walk just to take a walk?

As you go about your day today, consider everything you’re doing is like this- everything represents a finite opportunity to savor your life on some level. Everything is precious.

If it doesn’t seem that way, I think you’ll find it paying more attention can make it seem that way.

At the climax of his “simple meditation” trip, he asks us,

to be very still, quiet,

and edge ride between openness on one hand, and having this delicate direction for our attention on the other,

and feel the softest, quietest part of ourselves,

which is fundamentally enough

and fundamentally safe.

This has been one of the most precious pointers in my life.

So why do I meditate?

I meditate because I have accepted one explanation of what the fuck is going on (a.k.a. – Reality), and meditation is the best practice to help me live this Reality.

The Reality I have accepted:
All things are appearing and disappearing, all the time. That’s how the universe works. What I see, is an appearance. How I feel, is an appearance. What I taste, is an appearance.

They all appear, and then disappear.

(We can talk about why this explanation is meaningful another time. Let’s stick to how I apply this version of Reality.)

Once I have accepted this version of Reality, I had to accept another fact- I sucked at noticing, remembering, embracing, and applying this version of Reality as I was going through it. In other words, I was constantly seeing Reality inaccurately: I felt insulted when that jerk cut in line; I thought I needed to find eternal happiness.

I need to get better at living with this version of Reality.

My goal is to pay attention to Reality more often and more precisely. I have found meditation to be the most effective method to improve my awareness, because meditation offers specific and tested practices to work on paying attention.

First, meditation let me feel what being mindful was like. Let me use and example to explain what I meant- If no one has ever told you what singing out of tune was like, you would have no idea what being in tune sounded like. Meditation showed me how I was constantly distracted, hence I began to know what was being “not distracted” like.

Second, meditation also made my awareness more precise. Am I feeling anger, or is it fear? Am I sensing pressure, or is there also heat? This is similar to the ability to tell mahogany from red. Meditation increases the fidelity of my senses.

I don’t think there is an end state because there will be new things appearing and disappearing throughout my existence. When my mom dies, I am certain there will be phenomenon that I will be experiencing for the first time. Or when I taste a perfectly baked sourdough bread for the first time, I will experience a completely different level of delight.

I need to be as prepared as I could as Reality unfolds. I want to notice as much as I could. And then, I want to uncover the meaning of all phenomenon by applying the version of Reality I have accepted.

Jobs officially returned as the CEO of Apple at the age of 44.

I am 44.

The moment we existed high school, age started to become irrelevant. It was as if, at the moment of graduation, the line of age just elongated and became seamless, that it really didn’t matter anymore where you were on that line.

44 used to feel old. My first boss was 44. She was boring, old fashioned, had an ugly hairstyle. I laughed at her routines- She would always read her newspaper with a cup of coffee at 8:45am with oldies playing in her office.

44 used to mean maturity. One of my college friends’ dad was 44 when he dropped of his son at orientation. He had a beer belly, seemed wise, and drove a convertible.

I am 44.

I am a father. I am very stubborn with my routines. I no longer give a shit about what I wear. I am not particularly wise. I am no Steve Jobs or Hitler.

It does not matter where I am on that seamless line.

I am 44.

(Image “Invisible Line” By JULIE MEHERETU @ https://www.centrobotin.org/en/recorrido_piece/invisible-line/)