Here’s a simple idea worth exploring- what goes on inside your brain affects what happens in reality. What you do. How you effect the world. Not sure how predetermined things are but my experience suggest some degree of randomness in mental activity. Yet these random thoughts and ideas and activity tend to be funneled through familiar structures and lead to non-random habits and routines.
The analogy I liked was that of a cunning jailbreak. There is no escaping our heads (or is there? One can, within the brain, experience a sense of transcendence). We really need to learn more about these things.
Jailbreak- if you want to leave your existing brain-jail, you’ll have to plot it. This can seem silly. Why should anybody have to play tricks on themselves? But we do, and these tricks WORK, and believing ourselves to be above them is the quickest way to fall into the trap. (Perhaps this doesn’t apply for people who already have coded discipline into their subconscious. I have little inkling of what that feels like.)
(Whoops, I published that prematurely.)
The best thing in my life right now, apart from my awesome job and the fact that I have a home of my own, is the daily fitness routine I have developed. I do squats in the shower and I keep track of them on my kitchen wall:
This is working out very well for me. I have been progressively polishing off one of my oldest limiting beliefs- that I will always be skinny and have weak chicken legs. I could do pull ups and pushups but I was never fit enough to comfortably run 2.4km, so I kinda grew to assume I’d always hate those runs. I ran around the block at my place several times but I never developed flow at it; it was never pleasure.
Doing pushups and squats is kinda pleasurable now. Pushups have always been kinda pleasurable for me if I’m moderately fit. Squats and runs never. I always had chicken legs.
Coupling squats and showers for me has been what I call a “jug of water solution”. The jug of water story is trivial-sounding but significant. I once cleaned out a jug from a cupboard at my parents’ place and filled it up with water before putting it in the fridge. I never had to tell anybody that I did it, or why it ought to be done- but once it was implemented, it stuck. Everybody used the jug of water, and refilled it whenever it was empty. It became the new norm without any argument. Its value was self-evident, and the means to sustain it were self-evident too.
Since then I’ve always kept an eye out for similar jug-of-water solutions. Squats in the shower is one. Another seems to be to keep a book by the bed. My wife and I were talking about our childhood reading habits and she described how she would read books before going to bed, and she would fall asleep while reading (why is my pillow so hard?) and then go right back to reading the moment she woke up. I completely related to that. Somehow that habit fell along the wayside over the years as new and more compelling distractions become available. I’m interested and curious to rediscover and re-establish that habit to see where it leads.
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Sometimes a word vomit needs to be done from scratch. 2 things on my mind. How do I convey to people the importance of doing things for yourself? I can preach it at length or I can just put it out there and demonstrate it. Trivial issue.
2nd- how do I resolve the recurring problems- lack of focus, inevitable distraction? It seems to me that the solution necessitates meditation. Breaking from a pattern requires nothing short of a cunning jailbreak. I need the sort of clarity I can only get from emptying my mind and allowing the solutions to rise gently to the top of my mind.
I’m thoroughly convinced that we needed to go to space. I now think I’m also convinced that mediation is equally important, if not more important- for the same reasons. Expansion of human consciousness for the purpose of diminishing human suffering and improving human wellness. We can talk about the futility of life once we’ve solved poverty and every major problem faced by earthlings. (The entire question is a bit of a trap. We have not yet devised a method to transcend our brain chemistry, so we are limited to working within it. We all seek chemical highs one way or another. Consistently, the best ways include exercise, meaningful relationships, growth, mastery, all that good stuff. A lot of times, what feels like despair can be traced to low blood sugar, dehydration, sleep deprivation, a lack of mental clarity. This isn’t to imply that depression isn’t a real and horrible sickness that afflicts the best of us- it is. I’m just saying that we have to remember that we are animals with chemicals in our heads, and it’s worth experimenting with multiple things to see if anything works. It’s possible that nothing might; but you owe it to yourself to at least try.)
Space, and meditation, expanding human consciousness to diminish human suffering.
The challenge is to do it in a sustainable way. There are many things that give you a real moment of illumination- like an intense attraction to a beautiful stranger with whom you hit it off perfectly. But such romances are often fleeting, ending up as a positive memory and little more. The challenge is to build something analogous to a lasting, happy marriage. Something that’s a commitment rather than an experience, something that’s built and nurtured.
Here’s how education should begin- What’s interesting and exciting about the world? What’s worth being curious about? Do you know why you’re in this building? Real reason and fake reason. Real reason is to train you to be compliant factory workers, interchangeable, dispensable. Prepare you for life? What is life? What do you want to know? What do you want to do? For the working world?
What is the working world? People work to earn money to pay for things that other people work to produce. And people are paid to make you think and feel that you need more than you actually do- to exploit your weaknesses and impulses and subconscious desires to make you buy the shit they’re working so hard to produce. And the funniest (or saddest) thing is that they are not immune to their own effects. People working in marketing and advertising are susceptible to their own wiles and keep doing what they doing to earn money so they can buy shit too. What is happiness, what is pleasure, what is joy, and why do we believe that climbing the social ladder will yield it?
What is interesting, fun, exciting, beautiful? Who are the best teachers you’ve had?
Why do I keep thinking about education? I think it’s because the process of thinking about it makes me feel like I might be figuring out how to educate myself. Maybe I should skip the middle step and just go straight to sorting myself out. I’m going to start scheduling and deleting drafts to tidy up my blog a little.
You’re actually describing phenomenology, or more accurately, social phenomenology, or phenomenological sociology (depending on how assertively the related disciplines want to claim ownership of this paradigm). The cycle of social reality is this: (takes breath) A person being-in-the-world, who experiences a social world shared and made possible by other people, acquires ‘recipe knowledge’ on certain ways of thinking, feeling, existing, etc which then shapes the internal meanings he attaches to his outward social actions that, in turn, makes him a contributor in creating the social world. Cycle continues. — actually it’s more elaborate than that, but I’m tired and am giving a succinct version.
Anyway, it’s an idea that’s already been explored for the better part of a century, though admittedly it doesn’t receive as much exposure as it should (Perhaps because it’s more of a processual explanation of how ‘reality’ is constituted on the level of meaning and social action, rather than a valuation or politicization of it?).
Try reading Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Schutz.
This book in particular is fabulous, though it is notoriously difficult to fully grasp:
http://www.amazon.com/Phenomenology-Perception-Routledge-Classics-Merleau-Ponty/dp/0415278414/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1368417955&sr=8-2&keywords=merleau-ponty
awesum!! thanks man