5TH THOUGHT

December 1st, 2018

Do you know what your fifth thought from now is going to be?

Oddly enough, I have a better probability of knowing what your fifth thought is going to be than you do, simply due to the mere fact that you are reading this or listening to me.

You do not know what is next on the plane of reading or sound until you actually encounter it.  Perhaps a quick opinion, thought, or emotional reaction gets squeezed in between sentences, or perhaps you get distracted and veer away from this content.  But if you stick with it, and you have the requisite resources to comprehend what this content intends, then your mind is being appropriated and guided by this content. 

There is an even easier way to highlight this unsettling fact:

If you were to turn away from this content and do absolutely nothing, can you predict what your fifth thought from the moment you start the exercise will be?  No, not at all.  Thoughts simply arise.  Perhaps we’ve had the thought before and it’s simply repeating, but did we plan the repetition?  Not at all.

Delving into this idea by paying attention to the actual moment-to-moment experience of this unpredictable waterfall of thought and sensation can be a little eerie, though exploring such an area can yield equally unexpected treasures.  This idea often arises once a healthy meditation practice is in full swing and exploring it can allay fears.

It can also highlight the potential importance of scheduling.

We often hope that our will power will somehow magically be strong enough to help us dictate our behavior with ironclad success, but this is a relatively useless habit of self-reassurance.  The reassurance has almost no impact on the future actions we hope we will have the will power to undertake.

Those who are simply productive every single day are operating far more from a habit of doing so rather than being some kind of benevolent dictator of themselves.

If we want to become like such productive people, we need to actually schedule that productivity everyday until such behavior becomes a habit.  There are apparently thresholds of habit formation that accord to 3 days, 7 days, 21 days, and so on and so forth.  Regardless of the actual breakdown for a human brain to rewire itself so that a behavior has a high probability of occurring every single day, it is clear that such habit formation exists and a month seems to be a fairly reliable time interval to rely on for this matter.

Forming a habit is akin to creating a structure of thought that repeats on it’s own.  We might not be able to predict our 5^th thought in a random situation, but with behaviors that we schedule and successfully turn into habits, we can begin to predict what we will do in the future.

For example, what is the probability that brushing your teeth will be among the first 10 things you do in the morning?  Probably fairly high, and since it is fair to reason that actions derive from some sort of thought, it’s equally fair to say that brushing one’s teeth will be somewhere nearer to the first thought of the day.  An organization is occurring with this formation of habit, even if the behavior seems so automatic as to require no thought at all.

More importantly might be to schedule free thought about a given problem.  We can become so ritualized that much of life goes on autopilot and by merely going through the motions we are perhaps at risk of letting the most powerful parts of our brain go to rot.

This is the dynamic, curious, searching, problem-solving part of our brain that requires some unknown to chew on.  This is the opposite of the habitual function of the brain.

But can we combine the two?  Productive people who seem to accomplish a lot have done exactly this. 

They have formed a habit of interacting with the unknown.

Such individuals likewise do not know what that 5^th thought is going to be, but with a habit in place, they are fairly sure that it’ll be used to help unlock the next piece of whatever unknown puzzle they have at hand.

This episode references Episode 44: Autopilot and Episode 188: Customizing Autopilot.

WHAT IS A WORD?

November 30th, 2018

No really, what is it?

We use them near incessantly, but the absence of an immediate definition when asked is a bit uncanny.

What exactly is this thing that we use constantly, with others and ourselves?

The dictionary defines a word as “a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing” and the etymology seems to point towards the verbs ‘to speak, or say’.

Clearly its something that we first started doing with our vocal chords to make sound and then we figured out ways to transpile it into other equivalent forms, like writing.  But still, these are circumstantial aspects.  What exactly is a ‘meaningful element’ as pulled from the definition.

Meaning itself is always explained and extrapolated by the use of a whole lot more other words.  The elusive nature of some kind of core of meaning here can be a bit unsettling, like the search for some kind of intrinsic self. In many religions the word ‘soul’ is used, but go looking for one and it’s quite difficult to find, at least compared to say looking for a cloud, or sunshine, or a person, or a Higgs Bosun Particle.  While it’s beyond the current scope to wonder productively about the relationship between soul and a person, it is curious to wonder if the word ‘soul’ is functioning in much the same way that a whole bunch of other words need to be recruited to establish the meaning of any given word, hence definitions.  For a moment, this sounds like some sort of Ponzi scheme.  Perhaps it is.

What a word primarily does is encapsulate a relationship.  That wordy definition that calls upon all sorts of other words in order to define something is in essence extrapolating the relationship that the word symbolizes using a whole bunch of other words in relation to one another.  

A transitive verb is a good place to explore this.  A transitive verb is simply an action from one object to another.  He poured the coffee, for example describes a relationship between a person and the coffee.  That person does something to the coffee.

But what about a word like coffee?  That’s just a thing, so how is it a relationship?

This requires a step back.  The word coffee, whether heard (by my voice) or read on a screen is not the black bitter liquid that many people drink in the morning to try and jumpstart their haggard brain.  It is either a distinct pattern of sound waves or it is a distinct set of shapes pulled from the alphabet and arranged in the correct order.  If that bitter black liquid was somehow actually manifested every time the word coffee were said or written, we’d have a very strange mess on our hands.  What a word like ‘coffee’ actually does is define a common relationship to reality between people who are familiar with the word.  The word coffee has more to do with talking to each other than it has to do with our actual experience of coffee.

Another way of thinking about word as relationship is to think about university studies.  Somehow, words are being added to each discipline.  Why is this?  As we investigate subjects, the relationships between things become more nuanced.  What this means is that we discover a complexity of relationships inside of relationships, and so our need to describe them arises and a word is born.

We might, for example think about the relationships between people for a moment.  We can describe two people as ‘married’, and that is a very easy way of thinking of a word as a relationship.  But if we take those same two people and place them inside a Truman Show like experiment and watch all of their personal interactions, we might walk away from that voyeurism and say that their relationship is more complicated than previously thought.  The word ‘married’ might not be plump enough to fit every way we see them relate and interact with one another.

Research, in some ways is akin to taking a subject and putting it in that Truman Show like experiment and observing it with a greater degree of attention.  We can again look at the institution of university and realize that the whole darn thing is actually a gargantuan vocabulary lesson.

Before departing from this wordy subject, its important to note the movement inherent in nearly every level of this ponderism.  Relationships are perhaps more productively thought of as processes and not necessarily static objects.  Words shift in their meanings as their use is stretched and moved.  We might be tempted to think of language as a kind of rich tapestry of woven concepts, the placement and weave of each strand denoting the relationships words seek to symbolize.  But this is static.  We are better to think of language as thick vines, weaving in and around one another, growing in all directions, attempting to cover the world, lacing into it at every point and spreading to try and encompass everything. 

What is left to wonder is how language changes the things it seeks to describe.  We might even be tempted to view language as a kind of virus that infects our brains and appropriates our bodies in order to change the environment around us and consequently, the world.  Virus is such a negative word though.  We might be tempted to redefine the relationship we have to language.  Perhaps it is a symbiotic relationship.  It is a nearly infinitely malleable tool that can be refashioned. 

Are you getting everything out of your relationship with language that you could?

ENERGY LEVELS

November 29th, 2018

Who are you when you are tired?

Who are you when you are exhausted?

Who are you when you’ve finished hiking for 12 hours?

Who are you after a cup of coffee?

Who are you in the morning after a heavy night of drinking?

Who are you after 5 successive days of abundant sleep, consistent exercise, and healthy food?

All these situations evoke different personalities from us.  Though we seem to be the same person - the same body walking around and being subjected to these things, the state of consciousness and the probability that we will treat others well varies drastically depending on the situation.

That last one sounds great.  5 successive days of abundant sleep, exercise and healthy food.  But what percentage of people that we encounter during the day even come close to this kind of regiment?  It’s quite possible the answer is none.

Most of us have fallen victim to habits formed from trying to patch up these losses in energy.  We drink loads of caffeine in the morning and then throughout the day, being totally oblivious to the fact that caffeine has a 12 hour half life.  Meaning if you have a cup of coffee at 3pm, then half of the caffeine in that cup will still be working it’s magic at 3am.  No wonder sleep wasn’t all that restful and when the next morning comes, more coffee seems to be the answer, when in reality it added to the problem.

These simple mistakes that snowball into habitual behaviors have a strong influence on who we are.  Regardless of the debate surrounding free will, few people would argue that it’s simply easier to be a nicer version of ourselves when we’re well rested, and that the probability of saying something regretful when exhausted is quite a bit higher in comparison.  While it is possible to make a better mindful choice when our past self has conspired to make things difficult for us by being stingy with all the things that give us energy, it’s silly not to try and make the better choice a bit easier.

Strangely, the path to reversing such bad habitual behaviors is not easy.  It’s a paradox that getting to a better energy level where things feel easier begins with decisions and behavior that is so difficult.

But this paradox presents a kind of compass.  Whatever we are afraid to give up, whatever we are too lazy to do, whatever we crave…  All of these things point us in certain directions and the paradox is realizing that we should march in the opposite direction to many of these urges. 

RACING, SCULPTING

November 28th, 2018

The lens through which we view things can drastically impede our abilities.  For example, a project that we might undertake, such as starting a business, can be forever postponed if we look at it as a sort of race that requires a perfect start.  The outcomes of races generally have a high correlation with how they begin, and so we might hesitate forever with our first step regarding a project because we are trying to imagine the perfect step.

Such projects, however, are more like sculptures.  There is no time limit, though limiting time is often very good for progress and productivity.  More importantly, making a sculpture is not a race.  Pieces can be torn off of a sculpture and refashioned in a way that we cannot go back to a certain part of a race and rerace it. 

This second part about doing one part of a race over is innate to the perspective of perceiving a potential project like a race.  The fear of making that mistake before even starting is not properly picked apart.  Whereas, the sculptor looking at a mound of clay naturally has an inverse perspective:  Whatever progress or mistake is made doesn’t matter, it’s all clay anyway and it can be infinitely molded, until it’s just right.

Lack of motivation is almost always the absence of a good question.

Questions are catalysts that can radically alter the lens through which we look at the world.  Something as simple as: am I looking at this potential project like a race or like a sculpture has the potential to instantly ease the mind of fears that stagnate progress or initiation. 

We’re often compelled to collect quotes and jokes, but we may be better served to collect questions and form a kind of filter with that collection so that when we find ourselves stagnating, hesitating or fearful, we can run the situation through this filter of questions to jostle our perspective of the situation and see if something new reveals itself.

We’re best off to simply start:  what questions are you asking yourself these days?

SECOND SHOT

November 27th, 2018

“Sorry, couldn’t hear you.  What did you say?”

Upon hearing this, how many times do we say something different than what came out the first time?

The chance occurrence of our sound vibrations failing to zip across space and light up another person’s brain in just the right way offers a common and unusually ripe situation which elicits a rare case when we are impelled to pause and think for just a moment longer about how we want to impact our surroundings and the people we wish to connect with.

Normally we don’t feel the urge to slow down and think carefully before saying something.  We just say it.  But just like the phenomenon of walking away from some discussion or altercation and only later thinking of the brilliant thing that we could have said, this circumstance gives us a similar perspective.  Our lack of impulse to pause before speaking, and our obsession with rethinking what we’ve said after the fact clearly indicates that we usually only have an opinion about what we say after it’s been said.  It’s almost as though what we hear ourselves say is a bit of a surprise.  A surprise that is often underwhelming and seems somewhat disconnected from what we originally felt we were thinking.

What can we infer from this about all future things we will say?  Chances are good we’ll wish we’d considered our words just a little bit longer before speaking (or tweeting).

It may seem ridiculous to screen every word before utterance, but this would not be the remedy.  A brain practiced in mindfulness develops an ability to notice thoughts as they happen.  It’s almost as though there is a second mind, or second sight on what happens in real time.  With steady practice, this makes our words feel like a second shot instead of the trigger-happy first.

Mindfulness is merely a different relationship to thoughts and anything that arises in consciousness.

To put this into perspective, we can couch the matter in a more approachable question:

Would you like it if all of your relationships with family, friends and strangers were better than they currently are?

Only the deluded narcissist would say ‘no’.

Can you imagine any benefit to having a better relationship with your own thoughts and feelings?

Like most anything, how can we expect progress without a dedicated, consistent focus towards that end? 

Just as consistent discussions around the dinner table improve our family relationships, and bonfire talks strengthen friendships, meditation is an example of that time needed to improve our relationship to our own thoughts and feelings.

Time spent with a loved one helps our ability to notice their hopes, their needs, and the ways which we might add to their life.  Time spent in concentrated effort with our thoughts and feelings, likewise helps us notice their flow, course and aim.  Developing this ability to consistently and potentially constantly notice such internal workings enables us to guide them, change them, or downright leave them be.  Such mindfulness does not erase the ability to feel anger, but it does give one the ability to watch the anger happen without acting on it.

How often do we look back and wish we hadn’t said something?  Wouldn’t it be better to look back and think “I’m glad I didn’t act on that anger.”

Those second shots we get when someone fails to hear what we say, may be one of the best ways for someone to glimpse of what life is like with a meditation practice.