So last week I didn't really check in here or write at all. There are a few reasons for that. First and foremost, I got a new kitten named Boo (short for Boo Radley, for those interested). I took a few days off of work to take care of him and get him accustomed to life in my apartment, and my boyfriend has been staying here to help me out as Boo is my first cat. Between my two boys, I've been busy. It's funny though how I'm starting to see things in a different way, even when I'm not trying to.
I've been catching my boyfriend up on old episodes of Dexter and True Blood (two of my favorites), so we've been switching back and forth between the two. One episode of this, a couple of that, etc. when we start to get bored. We do this a lot. Not he and I, specifically, but people in general. My mother can't just watch one show. She'll pick two or three, and flip back and forth during the commercials. This practice isn't horrible. It's perfectly innocent, and understandable. But I can't help but draw the parallel of people who "channel surf" in real life.
We all know someone like this. One thing isn't enough. In the way that another show on another channel might be more interesting, another job/relationship/location might prove more fulfilling. This person can jump from thing to thing looking for total fulfillment, or at least freedom from boredom.
There are a few important things to note here. First of all, when you switch TV shows like that in the middle, you never get the timing just right. You always miss something. You miss the first couple of minutes after the commercials cut off, and you have to try and figure out what's missing. When you're constantly bouncing around in your life, I would imagine it's hard to have any feelings of continuity.
On another note, there's something voyeuristic about channel surfing. You essentially get to drop in on other people lives as an outsider and watch things unfold. And then when you get bored, you go check in somewhere else.
The whole thing also makes me wonder what the fascination is. What are we searching for? Are our own feelings of inadequacy driving us to live vicariously through images on our televisions? Are we longing to feel a connection with a character, to identify, to see some of ourselves? Are we looking to fictional characters to give us answers on how to live our lives?
I know I'm out on a limb here. I know that channel surfing is not the gateway drug to living a life of running and escapism. It's TV, for fucks sake. But my mind has been going to some interesting places lately, this being one of them.
At the end of the day, the real question is: Why is the prospect of living our lives, our own lives, and seeing things through so terrifying? Your perfect ideal doesn't exist. It's not real. And even if it were, and even if you found it, something would be wrong with it.
Your perfect ideal is right now. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing. Right now is also your eternal hell. Every moment of every day contains both of these mutually exclusive states. How can that be, you ask? Because this moment is the only one that's real. Yesterday is contained entirely in your memory, and check my last post for my thoughts on perception and reality. Tomorrow hasn't been born.
You've got right now. It's perfect, it's hell, and it's yours.
Go live.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
"Time is but the Stream I Go A-fishing In"
After a few more sessions of sitting, I began to notice something I thought was funny. I don't let myself look at a clock or timer while I'm meditating, doing so would only feed into my thinking about how much longer I have to go. However, there seems to be a pattern. What I guess are the first few minutes of my sitting feel like they take absolutely forever, but after that initial period the rest of it flies by before I have time to realize it.
It made me wonder, why does time go by so much faster when I'm meditating?
The "obvious" answer is that it doesn't. Time is time. I can't speed it up, slow it down, or stop it. The second hand on a clock is consistent. Uniform. Unchanging (unless the battery is dying... hehe). So then what changes? What makes time feel like it goes by faster or slower depending on what's going on? The only answer I can come up with is perception. My perception, to be specific.
We all perceive things differently. Talk to 10 witnesses at the scene of a crime, and they'll all tell you something slightly different. Our mind instinctively takes reality and packages it away in a way that makes the most sense to us. We could think the same color is a different shade, my hot could be your cold, etc. My reality is very personal, and not consistent of all that much reality when you think about it.
Here is the inherent flaw of perception. Any time you filter reality through anything, it's not reality anymore. There have been plenty of days at work when I felt like the shift was ddrraaggggiinngg on to no end, only to have someone else comment on how quickly it was going by.
Usually I find that time seems to go by more quickly when I'm distracted by something. A busy night goes by much faster than a slow one. I can easily get wrapped up in a good movie or playing a game and not realize that hours have gone by. So why does the same thing happen when I meditate? I'm not distracting myself in meditation, actually the opposite. I remove all of the distractions that I can control.
Thoughts, actions, everything "takes up" time. Or rather, numbs us to the passing of time. We don't notice time slipping past us while we're totally engrossed in things. So what happens when you take the thoughts away? We measure time the way we measure everything else, in relation to other things. In that state of deep meditation, when thoughts begin to float away and you're truly able to sit in the moment without floating away with them, do we not notice time passing because we have nothing to base it on? Does it exist at all? Do we exist in it?
Consider my mind thoroughly fucked.
PS: Happy Thanksgiving, to any and all Thanksgiving celebrators out there!
It made me wonder, why does time go by so much faster when I'm meditating?
The "obvious" answer is that it doesn't. Time is time. I can't speed it up, slow it down, or stop it. The second hand on a clock is consistent. Uniform. Unchanging (unless the battery is dying... hehe). So then what changes? What makes time feel like it goes by faster or slower depending on what's going on? The only answer I can come up with is perception. My perception, to be specific.
We all perceive things differently. Talk to 10 witnesses at the scene of a crime, and they'll all tell you something slightly different. Our mind instinctively takes reality and packages it away in a way that makes the most sense to us. We could think the same color is a different shade, my hot could be your cold, etc. My reality is very personal, and not consistent of all that much reality when you think about it.
Here is the inherent flaw of perception. Any time you filter reality through anything, it's not reality anymore. There have been plenty of days at work when I felt like the shift was ddrraaggggiinngg on to no end, only to have someone else comment on how quickly it was going by.
Usually I find that time seems to go by more quickly when I'm distracted by something. A busy night goes by much faster than a slow one. I can easily get wrapped up in a good movie or playing a game and not realize that hours have gone by. So why does the same thing happen when I meditate? I'm not distracting myself in meditation, actually the opposite. I remove all of the distractions that I can control.
Thoughts, actions, everything "takes up" time. Or rather, numbs us to the passing of time. We don't notice time slipping past us while we're totally engrossed in things. So what happens when you take the thoughts away? We measure time the way we measure everything else, in relation to other things. In that state of deep meditation, when thoughts begin to float away and you're truly able to sit in the moment without floating away with them, do we not notice time passing because we have nothing to base it on? Does it exist at all? Do we exist in it?
Consider my mind thoroughly fucked.
PS: Happy Thanksgiving, to any and all Thanksgiving celebrators out there!
Thursday, November 18, 2010
There's a First Time for Everything...
Well, ladies and gentlemen of the internet... I sat.
After the last post I started thinking, what am I waiting for, really? Why do I keep creating excuses, delaying it, when it really can't be as bad as I'm building it up to be. And, aside from a slightly sore back, it wasn't.
I set an alarm on my phone for 10 minutes. I didn't want to bite off more than I could chew the first time, and I thought that sitting for way longer than I could take would only serve to deter me more. I'm going to try and extent that a few minutes each time, and see where I end up.
It took me a while to settle into a position. I still can't get myself into a full lotus (I can do half, but it's incredibly painful which seems to defeat the purpose slightly), but I think some stretching before and after should help. I sat cross-legged on my floor, and found a nice blank part of my living room wall to look at. Even though I couldn't get into it, I put more emphasis on my posture than anything. I figured that so long as I wasn't slouching, not having my legs crossed up perfectly right away was less important. At first I started by counting breaths, but I realized that it only made me think about how much time must have gone by, and I was putting too much effort and energy into the counting, so after a while I lost count on purpose.
The biggest difficulty I had really was that I kept wanting to close my eyes. I realized that it was because it's easier to drift away and daydream with your eyes closed. Staring at my wall kept me in the here and now, and not in a particularly enjoyable way. The thought dawned on me though... Why do we feel this great compulsion for distraction? I've spent hours on my couch doing absolutely nothing, but the images on my television kept me sufficiently distracted so I didn't care. Why is it that we need to be entertained all the time?
Humans seem to have this inherent need to be distracted and entertained. Why? Nothingness freaks us out, and I sort of get it but I don't. Don't believe me? The next time you're talking to someone, wait for a lull in the conversation. Wait it out. How long can the other person sit in silence with you without having to make some bullshit small talk just to fill the gaps?
It it the nothingness we're afraid of, or is it the everything that is contained in that "nothingness"? What fascinates me about Zen is that the answers aren't just handed to you. You need to find them yourself, but in order to do that you need to stop looking. Stop searching for enlightenment, stop wondering what all the secrets of the world are. Everything is here, right in front of you, you just need to shut the fuck up long enough to notice it. My truth may very well be different than yours, but the important thing is that no one tells me what it is.
Silence, emptiness, nothing, it holds so many possibilities. It's so complicatedly simple.
My god, I think I'm starting to get it.
After the last post I started thinking, what am I waiting for, really? Why do I keep creating excuses, delaying it, when it really can't be as bad as I'm building it up to be. And, aside from a slightly sore back, it wasn't.
I set an alarm on my phone for 10 minutes. I didn't want to bite off more than I could chew the first time, and I thought that sitting for way longer than I could take would only serve to deter me more. I'm going to try and extent that a few minutes each time, and see where I end up.
It took me a while to settle into a position. I still can't get myself into a full lotus (I can do half, but it's incredibly painful which seems to defeat the purpose slightly), but I think some stretching before and after should help. I sat cross-legged on my floor, and found a nice blank part of my living room wall to look at. Even though I couldn't get into it, I put more emphasis on my posture than anything. I figured that so long as I wasn't slouching, not having my legs crossed up perfectly right away was less important. At first I started by counting breaths, but I realized that it only made me think about how much time must have gone by, and I was putting too much effort and energy into the counting, so after a while I lost count on purpose.
The biggest difficulty I had really was that I kept wanting to close my eyes. I realized that it was because it's easier to drift away and daydream with your eyes closed. Staring at my wall kept me in the here and now, and not in a particularly enjoyable way. The thought dawned on me though... Why do we feel this great compulsion for distraction? I've spent hours on my couch doing absolutely nothing, but the images on my television kept me sufficiently distracted so I didn't care. Why is it that we need to be entertained all the time?
Humans seem to have this inherent need to be distracted and entertained. Why? Nothingness freaks us out, and I sort of get it but I don't. Don't believe me? The next time you're talking to someone, wait for a lull in the conversation. Wait it out. How long can the other person sit in silence with you without having to make some bullshit small talk just to fill the gaps?
It it the nothingness we're afraid of, or is it the everything that is contained in that "nothingness"? What fascinates me about Zen is that the answers aren't just handed to you. You need to find them yourself, but in order to do that you need to stop looking. Stop searching for enlightenment, stop wondering what all the secrets of the world are. Everything is here, right in front of you, you just need to shut the fuck up long enough to notice it. My truth may very well be different than yours, but the important thing is that no one tells me what it is.
Silence, emptiness, nothing, it holds so many possibilities. It's so complicatedly simple.
My god, I think I'm starting to get it.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Eureka!! I have discovered.... The Obvious!!!
I noticed something the other night that really is fairly obvious, and completely logical, but for me felt like a big deal. I'm guessing I'm going to feel this way a lot. When I reach a conclusion on something lately, especially related to all this, I get this great big "D'oh!" feeling attached to it. Like whatever I'm realizing is so obvious, how have I not known this the entire time?
Bear with me in the coming future as I regale you with tales of these.
I will admit, that I have not been sitting. Aside from the fact that my body refuses to pretzel up like it's supposed to (I'm convinced zazen is for gymnasts), I just can't bring myself to do it. Since my apartment is new, I have lots of big plain white walls with nothing on them to distract me for me to stare at, wide empty spaces on my floor, and no one living with me to disturb me. It seems perfect. But I keep coming up with reasons not to. I don't know what's stopping me.
In lieu of that, however, I've been trying to get my feet wet with my own little meditative ritual I've been doing before bed. The first big difference is I usually do it after I get in bed (I know, I know, don't even say it). It's nothing special. I've tried just letting my mind go where it goes, without fueling it, and that doesn't quite work yet. Invariably I end up wandering off somewhere mentally and defeating the purpose. Just to help me stay in what I'm doing, I've been counting breaths. At first, I counted in One, out Two, in Three, etc. but the issue with that is that it's too automatic. It takes zero concentration. I've found it to be a bit harder to count in One, out One, in Two, out Two, etc. Not harder, per se, but at least requiring more conscious attention.
Now that that's all out of the way, on to my revelation.
You can tell how consistently I've been doing that by looking at how consistently I post on here. Not to say I post every time I do it, but there does seem to be a correlation. When I'm "meditating" (or at least my own version of it), things come up. I don't know from where, or why, or even really how, but invariably something pops into my head. Most of the posts on here so far have stemmed from a thought that came into my head while meditating. I think differently when I'm consistent. It feels almost like a different mindset. I feel more.... deliberate.
So what does this mean, and why am I talking about it?
I'm glad you asked!!
It means that I'm starting to actually feel how and why this is a good thing for me, and why I need to get the fuck over myself and just do it. Part of my shying away from real, live, honest-to-Buddha meditating was being scared of what would happen, and being scared that nothing would happen.
Do I think the world will unveil itself before me if I sit like a pretzel? No. It's very subtle. But it's tangible. There's a different feel that I can't put my finger on, but I like it.
There might just be something to this, after all...
Bear with me in the coming future as I regale you with tales of these.
I will admit, that I have not been sitting. Aside from the fact that my body refuses to pretzel up like it's supposed to (I'm convinced zazen is for gymnasts), I just can't bring myself to do it. Since my apartment is new, I have lots of big plain white walls with nothing on them to distract me for me to stare at, wide empty spaces on my floor, and no one living with me to disturb me. It seems perfect. But I keep coming up with reasons not to. I don't know what's stopping me.
In lieu of that, however, I've been trying to get my feet wet with my own little meditative ritual I've been doing before bed. The first big difference is I usually do it after I get in bed (I know, I know, don't even say it). It's nothing special. I've tried just letting my mind go where it goes, without fueling it, and that doesn't quite work yet. Invariably I end up wandering off somewhere mentally and defeating the purpose. Just to help me stay in what I'm doing, I've been counting breaths. At first, I counted in One, out Two, in Three, etc. but the issue with that is that it's too automatic. It takes zero concentration. I've found it to be a bit harder to count in One, out One, in Two, out Two, etc. Not harder, per se, but at least requiring more conscious attention.
Now that that's all out of the way, on to my revelation.
You can tell how consistently I've been doing that by looking at how consistently I post on here. Not to say I post every time I do it, but there does seem to be a correlation. When I'm "meditating" (or at least my own version of it), things come up. I don't know from where, or why, or even really how, but invariably something pops into my head. Most of the posts on here so far have stemmed from a thought that came into my head while meditating. I think differently when I'm consistent. It feels almost like a different mindset. I feel more.... deliberate.
So what does this mean, and why am I talking about it?
I'm glad you asked!!
It means that I'm starting to actually feel how and why this is a good thing for me, and why I need to get the fuck over myself and just do it. Part of my shying away from real, live, honest-to-Buddha meditating was being scared of what would happen, and being scared that nothing would happen.
Do I think the world will unveil itself before me if I sit like a pretzel? No. It's very subtle. But it's tangible. There's a different feel that I can't put my finger on, but I like it.
There might just be something to this, after all...
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Right Here, Right Now
So after being on my own for almost a month, I came back to spend the night at my parent's house. They had piled together all the stuff I had left and wanted me to look through it and decide what I wanted to keep and what we should get rid of. At the bottom of the pile lay my old, busted up, piece-of-crap computer that I had through college (that I am also typing on currently).
I was surprised to see it, more surprised that it still had the power cable with it, and even more surprised that it turned on!
The bottom of the laptop feels like it is about to burn holes into my legs from overheating, the fan inside of it sounds like a car engine, and whatever I ask it to do takes 10 minutes to load, but lo and behold it still works.
It was like time travel. As I hear the little song my poor neglected Acer played as it sprung to life, I watched a picture of a vacation I was on years ago spring up on my wallpaper. The programs I liked loaded for me automatically, as if my computer was saying, "Here you go, Kate. I know it's been a long time, but I missed you and I promise everything is as you left it."
Something on my desktop catches my eye. A Word document, whose title only takes a moment for me to place mentally. There's my ex-boyfriend's name, staring me in the face. I open the file, and the memories come rushing back. It was a letter he had written to me about what was wrong in our relationship, what I needed to do to fix things, etc. It brought me right back there. It made me remember who he was and what it was like to be with him, and why I was glad I wasn't anymore. It also made me curious as to what else was hidden in this hard drive of mine.
Nothing else was that interesting, really. An old copy of my resume, all my old music, a few stories I had started writing but never finished, and... my instant messaging logs. I had forgotten completely that my computer used to log them. So of course I sat there and read them all.
It was one of the strangest experiences I've had lately. It felt like spying, even though it's not spying if it's on yourself. I feel like by being here, on this computer, looking through these files, I'm disturbing or interrupting the 16-year old me that still lives here, if that doesn't sound completely mental.
The most unnerving part of it was how much of those conversations I didn't remember. Sure, I remember the people, even some of the things that were said, but the bulk of it was new to me. I knew it was me. It sounded like stuff I would say, but I had no recollection of it.
In reality, that's not that weird. We say and do so many different things it's impossible to retain them all, but I'm not used to being confronted with who I used to be.
In this moment, it makes so much sense to me why we need to live in the now, the right fucking now. Memories aren't like my computer. If I store something in the computer I can leave it there for years, and it will still be there. Our brains don't work like that. Memory is fluid. It is open to interpretation. It's based off your perception, which is totally screwed to begin with.
My right now is not that open to interpretation. I can have confidence in the things I know about this moment, because I am currently experiencing this moment. This moment is the only thing in the world that matters. Life is made up of a series of "this moments" and we can choose to live in them, or we can choose to escape our present moment by distracting ourselves with the "what-ifs" and "if-onlys."
This is it.
This is all you've got.
This moment.
Right now.
I was surprised to see it, more surprised that it still had the power cable with it, and even more surprised that it turned on!
The bottom of the laptop feels like it is about to burn holes into my legs from overheating, the fan inside of it sounds like a car engine, and whatever I ask it to do takes 10 minutes to load, but lo and behold it still works.
It was like time travel. As I hear the little song my poor neglected Acer played as it sprung to life, I watched a picture of a vacation I was on years ago spring up on my wallpaper. The programs I liked loaded for me automatically, as if my computer was saying, "Here you go, Kate. I know it's been a long time, but I missed you and I promise everything is as you left it."
Something on my desktop catches my eye. A Word document, whose title only takes a moment for me to place mentally. There's my ex-boyfriend's name, staring me in the face. I open the file, and the memories come rushing back. It was a letter he had written to me about what was wrong in our relationship, what I needed to do to fix things, etc. It brought me right back there. It made me remember who he was and what it was like to be with him, and why I was glad I wasn't anymore. It also made me curious as to what else was hidden in this hard drive of mine.
Nothing else was that interesting, really. An old copy of my resume, all my old music, a few stories I had started writing but never finished, and... my instant messaging logs. I had forgotten completely that my computer used to log them. So of course I sat there and read them all.
It was one of the strangest experiences I've had lately. It felt like spying, even though it's not spying if it's on yourself. I feel like by being here, on this computer, looking through these files, I'm disturbing or interrupting the 16-year old me that still lives here, if that doesn't sound completely mental.
The most unnerving part of it was how much of those conversations I didn't remember. Sure, I remember the people, even some of the things that were said, but the bulk of it was new to me. I knew it was me. It sounded like stuff I would say, but I had no recollection of it.
In reality, that's not that weird. We say and do so many different things it's impossible to retain them all, but I'm not used to being confronted with who I used to be.
In this moment, it makes so much sense to me why we need to live in the now, the right fucking now. Memories aren't like my computer. If I store something in the computer I can leave it there for years, and it will still be there. Our brains don't work like that. Memory is fluid. It is open to interpretation. It's based off your perception, which is totally screwed to begin with.
My right now is not that open to interpretation. I can have confidence in the things I know about this moment, because I am currently experiencing this moment. This moment is the only thing in the world that matters. Life is made up of a series of "this moments" and we can choose to live in them, or we can choose to escape our present moment by distracting ourselves with the "what-ifs" and "if-onlys."
This is it.
This is all you've got.
This moment.
Right now.
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