insights

Of Course the Universe is Conscious

A smart person once told me while I was looking up at some stars, to “please be aware that you are seeing.”

I’ve heard that and said it a few times since, and the initial reaction to that remark is typically something like, “Well, no shit.” It was mine, for a moment.

But it is really something profound, if you stick with that thought longer than a moment.

We are aware, to some degree, almost all the time. Awareness isn’t just a big part of life, it comprises life as we know it. So it rarely occurs to us that it needn’t necessarily be this way.

Yet we are aware. If we know nothing else, we know that is true. I mean, if there’s anything we take for granted, it’s this astonishing fact that we are aware of stuff. And it’s the coolest, most empowering fact of all.

If you can look down and see your legs, then I guess you could say you’re aware of yourself. Again, duh. But which part of you is aware of your legs? You’d probably say your brain, and while I’m not convinced that’s entirely correct, let’s say it is. Already we have something interesting happening. One part of something is aware of its other aspects.

Or at least some of its other aspects. I doubt anybody would be aware they had a liver if nobody told them, or if they did not deduce it somehow by becoming aware of other livers in other people. So your self-awareness is not complete, meaning you’re not aware of every single thing going on in your body. But we don’t need to have every possible bit of information about ourselves in order to be aware of ourselves or to know ourselves.

You are a part of the universe, I’m going to presume. So when you’re out late on a long weekend, leaning back on the hood of a ’76 Vista Cruiser looking up at the stars from some campsite here on earth, one part of the universe is suddenly acutely aware of another part of it.

It’s fair to say then, that at least in that moment, the universe is conscious of itself. Read More

by David on July 10, 2011

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How to See Straighter by Crossing Your Eyes

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Then she started screaming, and that’s when I asked myself what I was doing there at all. It was someone else’s idea, but it was either that or stay home Saturday night.

Horror movies were never my choice. These days I don’t like them because they’re just not very good movies. But when I was a kid, before I became preoccupied with their vacuous production values, I didn’t like them because they scared me.

Back then too, I would never see a horror movie out of my own volition. But you know how peer pressure and sleepover politics work when you’re a pre-teen. You do things you don’t really want to do, and I’d occasionally end up in front of one.

“People like to be scared,” was the stock answer whenever I’d ask why the hell anybody would voluntarily sit through something like Slumber Party Massacre II, but I don’t ever remember enjoying being scared, at least not then.

So in those early years, before I lost my ability to lose any part of myself in a bad movie, those occasions were almost guaranteed to be unpleasant experiences. But eventually I figured out a cure.

It was so simple, and it worked for so many other unpleasant bits in life. Enduring horror movies effortlessly was the least of it. Later I would use it to get through boring speeches without looking at my watch, sit through embarrassing moments (think marriage proposals at public sporting events) without cringing, and eventually to discover who I really was and what it really means to be human. But I’ll get to that.

The trick

The technique didn’t come to me right away, it evolved in a couple stages.

The most obvious way to get through a scary movie was to do your best not to watch it. Any time spent getting Tahiti Treat from the fridge, or making sarcastic remarks (until you get shushed) was time not spent actually watching the movie. But this technique isn’t always possible, tends to annoy others, and it’s pretty obvious to other people what you’re trying to do.

So one time, I happened to be wearing a baseball cap, and I put it low enough on my head so that the beak of the hat drooped over half the screen. It still looked like I was watching it fearlessly, but I was only seeing people’s legs, which wasn’t scary at all. I didn’t always block the nasty bits of the image, because sometimes a butcher-knifed delivery boy would drop into view, but it still broke the effect of the movie almost completely. By seeing only half the screen, only about 10% of the scariness made it through to me. Totally manageable.

But I didn’t always have a hat, and it still would probably look pretty conspicuous to anybody who bothered to look. Then one day it occurred to me — a way to watch the movie without being affected by watching it.

I would go ahead and watch the movie, and whenever I was getting a bit freaked out, I would cross my eyes just slightly enough to blur the scene, and the scariness was gone, instantly. It’s like it sucked me right out of the psycho-clown world and back into the unthreatening basics of the moment: an unlit living room with some other kids, watching a low-brow movie for kicks. Read More

by David on June 28, 2011

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Ten Ordinary Moments Away From Home

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***

In whatever dream I was having there’s a crash above me, and my body jumps and wakes me up. It’s pitch dark. Philip said there are monkeys that play on the roof at night. The generator must have gone off because my fan is dead and it’s sweltering inside. I’m being bitten all over, so I fumble for my keychain LED and click it on. To my horror the mosquito net is untucked and I’m exposed. I must have forgotten when I went to the bathroom earlier. I tuck it back in and scan around me with the flashlight. I’m sitting in a cone of white mosquito netting and in the faint light I notice the inside is dotted with hundreds of mosquitoes, all fat with my blood. For an hour and a half I stay up, scanning with my tiny light, until I’m sure I’ve killed every single one.

***

The sun is gone by the time we start rolling out of the station. I’ll be sleeping on the upper bunk. The train picks up speed and I’m watching the big buildings of the inner city give way to apartments, markets, parks and temples, and finally shanty houses. They’re built out of corrugated steel, and they back right onto the tracks, most of them open to my view. They shoot past me by the dozen and I can see figures moving in them. Mattresses. Decorations. Kids. A few of them are illuminated by a lamp bulb somewhere inside. The train is clipping along now and these little lightbox dioramas are flashing by me, several families per second.

***

Eight of us are sitting on our boards and the first set hasn’t come in, but nobody’s getting impatient. It’s probably not even 6am yet, there isn’t a lick of wind, and the east horizon is beginning to glow. The water is so warm it feels like the air. Normally we chat out here between sets, but talking right now would be absurd. I lay back on my nine-footer and I’m surprised to see the stars haven’t quite disappeared yet.

***

Three hours ago I didn’t know a soul in the whole country, and now I’m perched on the back of an Israeli girl’s motorbike, gripping the seat behind me with both hands as a pack of twelve of us tear through the Old Town. Large stretches of the town are closed up and dark. It’s raining a bit but it feels awesome. I don’t remember where they said we’re going, but I’ve been assured it’s not in the guidebook. Read More

by David on June 22, 2011

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Our Lives Are Not What We Think

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Last week I asked the readers a simple question: Where are you right now in your life, at this exact moment? I tried not to lead people to answer in any particular way, just to share the moment they’re in and how they felt about it.

I was blown away by the response. So many colorful little corners of time and space. Right now there are 140-some and counting, not including a few dozen sent in email form.

A lot of people said that it hadn’t really occurred to them to ask that very basic question (where the hell am I right now, exactly) and that it was quite a catharsis to take a minute or two to do just that.

Let’s get something straight

It’s hard to really observe the moment without its apparent context pushing in on it, that context being the rest of our lives, before and after. So the present moment’s apparent value is conditional on what it seems to mean for the rest of our moments.

We often can’t help but view the present moment in terms of what it means for other moments in the “chain” and for the character that needs them all to go a certain way. We forget that the only real fact to be had is the present moment, no matter what we think it is halfway-to, leading away from, or supposed to be.

So most of the time, we’re not really perceiving the physical details of the moment, we’re perceiving a sprawling mental map of what we think of our lives, of which the present is a small part. It feels like life is made of millions of moments like this, linked by cause and effect, extending each way from here and now. This leads to two huge problems: 1) a preoccupation with these imagined non-present moments, and 2) an astronomical devaluation of the present moment.

Of course, there are no non-present moments. Let’s get that straight before we go on: life is the present only. The past is thoughts in the present. The future is thoughts in the present. You can argue all you want that the past “existed”, but the notion of something having existed is also just a thought in the present.

The present is composed of experiences only. You can experience sights, smells, sounds, sights, feelings and thoughts. There is nothing else. This is life: the experience of the present moment, whether we’re occupied with the thought aspect of it, or the sensory aspect of it, or some of both. In most people, by adulthood the thought component takes over the other parts of experience. Contrary to how we normally experience life, our lives are not what we think.

Thoughts are completely useless except in how they suggest we act in the present moment. We know intellectually that the present moment is our only way of experiencing life, yet we let thoughts about what we experience become our primary experience, most of the time. Bad habit. Tragic really. But it’s normal.

About three years ago I had a bizarre experience during a family dinner which I now realize left me different forever. I won’t quite call it a Pandora’s Box effect, because it wasn’t evil that came out of the box (the opposite, really), and the box flops shut all the time when I get worked up or preoccupied. But let’s just say I could not go back to the same way of looking at ordinary moments even if I wanted to.

I published an article describing that experience and the insight it left me with, back when this blog had an audience that could fit on my couch. But as with so many of my articles I feel like I ended up taking a potent idea that could change a person’s life, and reducing it to a kind of neato thing that you might think about and forget by the weekend. Read More

by David on June 2, 2011

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Your Little Corner of Time

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Look away from the screen for a moment. Take a half-minute off from your blog-reading and look at the people and objects around you right at this instant. Get a good feel for the moment’s scenery and emotional tone, and when you’re done, read on.

(Do it now.)

Back?

I have a question for you:

Where are you at this exact moment in your life?

Obviously you’re in front of a computer screen of some kind (maybe a smartphone), so give us a little bit more context than that.

Where are you right now, physically, and how did you get there?

When I ask “how did you get here” I’m not looking for something like, “I rode my bike.” I mean, what circumstances and incentives brought you to this exact place you’re sitting now? What were you looking for that brought you here?

And I don’t mean these as rhetorical questions either. Tell me in the comment section below. Where are you right now, what’s going on, and how do you feel about that? Use a fake name and email address if your current moment involves hiding from bounty hunters or smuggling knockoff Ray-Bans and you’re concerned about privacy.

There are a lot of places you could be. Time and space can serve up a gazillion unique little corners to find oneself in. Maybe you’re riding a creaky city bus, iPhone in hand, on your way to a job you just started Monday. Or you might be first one in the office this morning and the main overhead lights aren’t on yet, because you wanted to tackle something you know you should have done yesterday. Or you could be in your roommate’s room, ready to click the browser closed and pretend you weren’t using his laptop, because you know he gets home from the gym around now.

But you’re right here. Look away from the screen again for a second.

That’s yours, for now. Your lot. This little corner of time you’re in — is it the result of a direct decision on your part, or is it more a product of what you might call “happenstance”? Did you decide to be here or did it sort of settle out this way?

Are you waiting on something? Avoiding something? Excited for something?

What moment have you arrived at, in this, the Greatest Story Ever Told?

And one final follow-up question, if you feel like answering it:

Do you feel like you are where you’re supposed to be?

I know that’s a subjective question and there are a lot of ways to look at it, but it’s definitely answerable.

That’s all I want to know. Please tell me. The reason why will come in the next post.

Photo by striatic

by David on May 26, 2011

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You Are Another Bull in the China Shop

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If I think about all the attention and time I’ve spent on deliberate self-improvement over the years, almost all of it surrounds the reining-in of some very basic human inclination — like eating, overthinking, avoiding pain, clinging to altered states, chasing “enough” — in order to avoid its nasty side-effects.

I don’t think I am especially prone to any of these human pitfalls, but they’ve done a number on me — and the people around me, through me.

Eating, for example, does keeps us alive, but it can get out of control rather easily, even threaten our lives. Thinking is indispensable, but it easily reaches snowball-velocity, leaving us restless or sleepless. Avoiding pain is sensible too, but looking back at my life there’s probably nothing that’s caused me more pain than my preoccupation with avoiding pain.

We can handily dismiss these dysfunctions as the effects of modern society: over-stimulation, consumerism, something in the water, the kids today, or too much television, and often we do. But I find it hard to believe there was ever a time when human beings weren’t constantly running afoul of their own basic human traits.

As human beings we’re each in the pilot seat of an incredibly powerful (and incredibly dangerous!) vehicle. How do we manage our abilities and inclinations without letting them run us — or others — through the ringer?

The “human condition” is a relatively new phrase, but the concept is ancient. All people are subject to a host of powerful influences on their poor little minds, no matter what social setting they come from. There are too many to name and they can be hard to articulate, but prominent among them are the need for a purpose, the need for affection, the need for security, anxiety about death, persistent curiosity, restlessness, idealism, and the lust for ego gratification.

These forces drive people to do anything and everything humans do: volunteer for churches, bulldoze forests, enlist in the army, talk to oneself, read philosophy books, gamble, gossip about celebrities, hug friends and family, spend a year in an ashram, hunt animals to extinction, save for a boat, commit suicide, write blog posts, hoard socks and underwear, steal the neighbor’s WiFi, burn ants with a magnifying glass, collect coins, drill for oil, tend gardens, run for office, avoid eye contact on the sidewalk, attend Klan rallies, buy oceanfront property, raise large families, or head off into the Alaskan wilderness with a 22 rifle and a bag of rice. Read More

by David on May 18, 2011

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Four Words That Make Me Suspicious of Myself When I Say Them

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There are a few words that raise a red flag when I catch myself saying them, at least when I’m not totally preoccupied.

Not that all instances of these words are dubious, but I do find I that whenever I need to make use of them, there’s a good chance I’m being at least a little presumptuous, simple-minded, or sneaky. They raise a similar red flag when I hear or read them too.

They aren’t “bad” words, but they do lend themselves to a certain kind of self-deception. They often hint at more going on.

“Wish”

I find myself using the word “wish” when I’ve decided I don’t like something the way it is, yet I’m not actually doing anything about it. There’s no real reason to declare my wishes. Whenever I start a sentence with “I just wish…” feel free to ignore me, I’m only wasting your time. My whiny face has probably made you tune out anyway.

Whenever I let the phrase “I wish” escape my mouth, all I really have to say is this: “I’m not happy with things the way they are. I would be happy if they were like this. So there.”

Not only is it useless for changing the circumstances, but it reinforces the myth to which I’ve momentarily fallen prey: that my happiness is dependent on my circumstances only and has nothing to do with my attitude. It’s a bitter little plea that life isn’t what I want it to be in this particular moment, and a dead giveaway that I’m not prepared to do anything about it right now.

Wishing is a desperate, self-defensive behavior. It gives you a little hit of relief from a reality you don’t want to deal with, but it sure doesn’t move things along.

Of course, in those moments, I’m too consumed by my fantasies to see that my attitude is usually the biggest and most damning feature of the present circumstances. If my attitude sucks, the circumstances suck. But acknowledging that would mean I have to be responsible for it, and it’s easier to instead wish for the cavalry to appear on the horizon and save me.

“Try”

I don’t know about you, but I know I insert the word “try” into a sentence when I’m not actually willing to take on the responsibility of promising I’ll do something. Yet I’m still willing to pretend I at least have the intention of doing it — somewhere in my mind.

I’ll try to call and ask about that. I’ll try to exercise every day. I’ll try to get it done on Friday after work.

It means: I might end up doing that if it’s easier than I expect it to be. Read More

by David on April 25, 2011

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The Thing That Makes This All Happen

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How many times in my life have I stood with four or five strangers at a street corner, waiting for the pedestrian light to change? 2000? 5000? Who knows. But I do know that in almost none of them do any of us want to be precisely there.

It’s the sort of moment that has a distinctly “in-between” character to it. It feels like a necessary but boring preamble to a more ideal moment which seems to be waiting for you somewhere across the street, but is really only in the mind.

Most moments are like this. Which means, of course, that most of human life is like this: not where we want to be. It’s mostly in-between.

If you could divide a human life up into two parts: the time spent feeling a sense of in-between, and the time spent feeling a sense of “arrival” I’d bet the proportions would be staggering — certainly 90-something percent “in-between”, probably closer to 100 than 90.

We share a lot of those kinds of moments with other people, even though the experience usually feels like a rather individual one, and we’re unlikely to think much about the others in it. Waiting in elevators. Going through the motions at work at 2:27 on an idle Tuesday. Riding the bus, again.

The “in-between” character present in the vast majority of our moments is created not by the moment’s actual details but by the persistent state of preoccupation of the person experiencing it. Preoccupation is the typical human experience, and it’s nothing other than the experience of an abstract past, future, or hypothetical moment in the mind stealing your attention from the one that’s really happening.

I’ve long believed that tedium is only a pattern of thought, not circumstance. Boredom is never a situational reality, only a self-defeating way of relating to the moment at hand, which always contains more detail and possibility than you could ever explore.

Again, this is normal. So my state of mind — I can’t speak for you — isn’t always receptive to the freshness and magnificence of “mundane” moments, even though I am now convinced that those qualities are always there behind my preoccupations.

But depending on the intensity of the preoccupying thoughts, I’ve found there are some pretty reliable ways of tapping into those qualities, even when the present moment is of that archetypal, in-between type you find in parking lots and waiting rooms.

An example from work: I often find myself at site meetings, which typically take place in a boxcar-sized field office, around a collapsible table with plastic folding chairs, populated by a handful of contractors, engineers, surveyors and developers. These meetings have a very predictable dynamic, with everyone waiting for a chance to bring up their biggest concern, nodding impatiently while others bring up theirs. They have a predictable, tired vocabulary (working days, “mobilizing”, change orders, tie-ins, inverts, grades, quantities) that seems to blur countless past and present and future moments together as if they are one indistinguishable, perpetual scene with no real unique characteristics and certainly nothing to feel and wonder or excitement about.

These patterns, if you experience them every day (and your workplace certainly has its own) can become almost unbearably ordinary. If you can somewhat imagine what a tax accountant feels like this time of year when they look at yet another T4 or a W2, or what a McDonald’s employee feels like when they come back to the same fries smell after two weeks off, then you know the stifling feeling of over-familiarity I’m talking about.

At this recent meeting, perhaps the tedium hit a breaking point in me and I slipped into a genuine recognition that behind those boring patterns, right in the room with me, was a damn miracle.

Eight beating hearts.

All the over-familiar talk in that room, all the annoying jargon, the impatience, the endless dialogue about construction schedules and the state of the industry, was the product of something truly astounding and humbling. Every instance in that scene of someone getting quietly worked up, getting self-righteous, getting talked over — or getting bored — was driven ultimately by one of eight beating hearts. And each was driving its owner to something. Some action, some attitude, some thought. Only because that’s what it does.

Why did the chicken cross the road? A beating heart, no other reason. Read More

by David on April 14, 2011

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What I Discovered When I Went Vegan for 30 Days

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Author’s note: As some readers have rightfully pointed out, “going vegan” is not just a matter of diet. This post, and the experiment it describes, pertains only to animal use as it relates to food.

This is the second experiment in two months that has made a dramatic difference in how I live and how I feel on a day-to-day basis. Last time I stripped my life of unnecessary and unused possessions, and this time I stripped it of animal foods.

I ate 100% vegan for 30 days, primarily to see what effects it had on my health and my self-discipline when it comes to eating. I found I took to it very easily, and my body felt like it had been waiting for me to make this change for a long time.

What I discovered

It wasn’t hard.

I listed my seven main reasons for never considering veganism before, and the main one is that I thought it would be too hard. I’m not sure what I thought would be hard about it: craving foods I couldn’t eat, finding something interesting to eat, having to read labels… none of it presented any real difficulty. Once I found how well my body fared without cheese and meat it really didn’t appeal anymore.

The hard part was finding stuff to eat in social situations. Most restaurants will offer the token veggie meal and not put much thought into it. Usually is just one of their other dishes, with tofu or veggies replacing the meat. It wouldn’t take much effort to add one inspired vegan dish to a menu. Not enough of a market for it yet I guess.

There is a great support network of restaurant reviews and forums set up to make this part of it easier for fellow vegans. That was a particularly cool part of this experiment — discovering that there’s a super-helpful vegan subculture out there making life easier for others.

I ended up expanding the palette of foods I ate, rather than restricting it.

The thought of removing several broad categories of foods from the picture made me expect to feel restricted to a few familiar dishes, and I’d already been feeling a bit of a lack of variety.

The opposite happened. I ended up experimenting with new recipes a lot more and eating foods I wouldn’t have tried otherwise. I learned quite a few new recipes and my culinary life is more vivid and interesting than ever. Food is more exciting to me now, and I honestly expected it would have to become a less gratifying part of my life.

I did spend more time cooking, trying a few new recipes a week. I love cooking so I didn’t worry too much about trimming my cooking time but I definitely could streamline it pretty easily if I had to.

I felt awesome physically, and right away.

Within a few days, I began to feel unusually light and alert. Everything seemed to require less effort and I had very little mental resistance to the prospect of doing things. Simple tasks like getting out of a chair or clearing up my dishes seemed to lose some vague character of annoyingness I didn’t realize they used to have.

Psyching myself up to exercise was much easier. There was no heaviness after I ate, no recovery period. My morning grogginess went away much quicker. There was no 3 o’clock wall. I didn’t get tired until bedtime. Read More

by David on March 30, 2011

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Why Your Fears Won’t Come True

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Fear doesn’t work the way we think it does. I’ll teach you something cool about fear that you can start putting to use right away.

When something scares you, you usually just have an aversion to the notion of that thing. Just the thought of making certain phone calls, confronting certain people, or making certain commitments makes the butterflies bubble up.

This is the point where we usually back down, and distract ourselves from the thought of it by checking email or doing some cleaning or organizing that suddenly seems important.

Quitting my last job to go traveling was something I was afraid of for a long time before I did it. It was a very small company, my boss had been good to me, and I knew it was going to be a blow that came out of nowhere. The thought of it made me nervous, and I decided to put it off till the next day, ten or twelve times.

Most fears keep us at arm’s length like that: we back down at just the idea of doing something nerve-wracking. The fear has done its job — to keep us from going there — and so we don’t look any closer at what it is we’re really afraid of about that idea.

If you do look closely at almost any fear, it’s always a specific moment you’re fearing. A moment with awful feelings in it — awkwardness, pain, shame, guilt, horror, angst. Life unfolds only in moments, so what else could the problem be except some of the moments that you might run into?

Ultimately that’s all you are ever fearing: moments that you believe will force you to experience feelings you really don’t want to experience. If you really break it down there’s nothing else that drives us but the appeal of feelings we want to experience and the fear of feelings we don’t want to experience.

Whatever the feeling is, it’s a feeling you’ve already experienced at some point in your life. You couldn’t be afraid of it if you hadn’t.

The longer we live, the more nasty experiences we have, and the more fears we carry around. But we forget that it’s really acute experiences we’re trying to avoid, and instead we let entire categories of actions and notions get dismissed from our lives, because they represent those experiences.

The cat who was afraid of grass for all the wrong reasons

We had a cat who was afraid of the front lawn. She would creep up to it, sniff it a bit, then tear across it like she was being chased. I watched her do this a few times before learning that my Dad had once turned on the sprinkler hose while she was lying beside it. After that, to her the lawn was a bad place, because it represented the threat of a terrible experience she didn’t want to have again.

She got over it, probably after accidentally having a few good experiences around the lawn. Animals are probably better at forgetting this stuff. Humans cling to fears because our thinking is so hopelessly lost in symbols and categories. We hold onto this idea that we can fence off the painful areas of life if we’re careful enough. Read More

by David on March 9, 2011

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Of Course the Universe is Conscious