Month: December 2020

I deliberately turned off all analytics so I don’t know if anyone is reading this site.

This is important: I myself don’t matter, but if what I do helps another person, that matters. This is an implementation of B’s “I’m not here for you, I’m here for me . . . “ philosophy. And whether I know about the readers (if there are any) or not will not make any difference to that hypothetical reader.

I’m trying to keep the ego at bay.

Yet I keep wondering. Get tempted. Look at the stats button in the WordPress app. Maybe I should fire up analytics.

That’s the ego.

I am writing this to remind myself that the ego nudges to the forefront with all sorts of reasons why it needs to be fed. They’re bullshit reasons, lies.

Keep your head down and just write for yourself. It’s working. It’s making your own life better. That’s the only reason you’re doing this.

But keep doing it in public, because even though I’m here for me, maybe this will help someone else. Just remember that they get whatever they get. It’s out of your control what they get, and it’s out of your control if anyone ever reads these words.

I don’t want to know about other people reading this, because that would give me a big fat head. (Or maybe they would criticize me and I would be sad.)

I’m not strong enough to fight off the ego, so it’s better to not let it put down roots at all. Stay invisible, make it impossible to know what’s happening out there. Put your head down and do the work.

I thought using WordPress as a journal was a silly idea.

I used fancy paper notebooks. Text editors, Google Docs, anything else you can think of. None of them worked over time. I stopped.

Maybe I was not mentally ready to write down my thoughts. But I think a simpler explanation is that the WordPress app is on my phone and within reach all the time.

There is less friction.

And there is something liberating about hitting “publish”. I have learned that saving a draft means the idea dies. I have a dozen drafts and I look at them now and go “meh”. In fact I will delete them as soon as I finish this.

The freedom of done.

Moral:

• Remove friction. Sometimes that looks weird. Judge not, just look at what happens.
• Terminal action. Think, do, move on.

Awaken; return to yourself. Now, no longer asleep, knowing they were only dreams, clear-headed again, treat everything around you as a dream.

Meditations 6?:31.

Check the reference later. 31 is right, but the 6, I don’t know.

Remember. This is all I remember from a couple of fevered years of Fourth Way. (I tried to revisit Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and gave up after a couple hundred pages, bemused by it and my former self.) And that’s probably not the main point of that teaching.

Still, the idea came from there, and I carry it with me still.

Saying “Remember!” to myself wakes me up and gives me an eagle’s view of me, in relation to the world. For a moment all is as it should be.

There is a feeling of scale that I get: me in relation to the entire universe. An appreciation for everything around me. Especially trees. I get a special love for trees when I do this around trees, even those planted in urban sidewalks.

That’s the easy part (but it leaves me so quickly). I forget again and become an automaton.

Treating the rest of creation as a dream — that’s the thought-provoking part. Is this the same as simulation theory?

If I treat everything as a dream, an illusion, then it’s malleable and can be changed or stopped at will.

Waking up stops the dream. Having a dream and knowing in the dream that it’s a dream? That also stops the illusion.

Since dream has many meanings, what if I take it to mean “as desired”? “I have always dreamed of sitting on a yacht in the Aegean Sea at sunset.” That sort of dream. Then the world is simply a reflection of what I desire. Change your desires, change your world.

Can thoughts change matter? I’m not going to get into that. What I do know is that my feeble, amateurish, intermittent efforts seem correlated with a good life today, both material and mental.

As an operating hypothesis, then, I treat the universe as malleable, as open to exploration and gaming like a computer game.

The important thing is to not look at the humans around me as NPCs. Probability = nil that I am the only sentient, self-aware player in this game. 🙂 In fact, it’s probably useful to question whether I am a player or NPC myself.

In any event, all around me is dreamlike in one sense. Every morning I wake up, and there are no more dreams. One day I will die, and this dream will disappear. (Funny how awakening from sleep to start a new day has the same consequence as dying.)

Random memory of B saying that.

Paradoxically by being there for his own benefit he helped countless others.

And that was his point. He was there for himself, to help his own predicament, and the only way to help himself escape his own predicament was to be helpful to the community around him.

It’s like D telling me one day that he did this thing (birthday cards for people) because he realized he was so self-centered and selfish and didn’t care what happened to people around him. And it hurt; he did not want to be that kind of man. So he just started sending people birthday cards. Then, one day he discovered that he genuinely cared about the people around him.

Wow. The people I have known who helped me in small ways and great. Both D and B have been dead for a long time. Yet they did small things and said small things that are still alive in me, making my life better (when I remember them and what they said). I’m a bit weepy right now.

I’m going to be knocked around. Stuff will happen, people will say things and my feelings will be hurt. This is inevitable.

Equally true is the fact that I’m going to make shit up in my head, and I’m going to take it seriously and wallow in it. This is guaranteed. You can take it to the bank.

So, what to do?

When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.

Meditations 6:11.

Let’s just take for granted, from now on, that all quotes from Marcus Aurelius come from the Gregory Hays translation of Meditations. I don’t read the other translations I have.

What I’m doing right now, by reading in the morning and writing these little thoughts, is building the counterweight, building the keel. When knocked off top dead center by some external event, my habits bring me back.

It happened while reading and drinking coffee this morning. I was talking to myself about something. In rehearsal, I was. As usual, it was some imaginary future event where in my imagination I was impressing an unknown audience of strangers who I would never see again because they exist only in my head with my stunning wisdom. I caught myself. Returned to Meditations.

That’s the spiritual keel bringing me upright after a self-inflicted gust of mental wind.

I did not take the episode seriously. It’s like the famous bemused Reagan quote, “There you go again!” There my brain goes again, talking to itself to puff up the ego. Remember. And back to top dead center.

As Marcus Aurelius says, “unavoidably”.

Even if I could become immune to outside events and how they affect my thinking (hint: not in this lifetime), I can never become immune to the brain generating its own thoughts.

I can’t stop or control my dreams at night, and I am going to experience random rehearsals and talking to self during my waking hours. The best I can do is develop a center of gravity that brings the pendulum back to rest.

That’s a good thing.

I just started working on a new skill via a paid course of instruction. It is evident that the information provided is valuable and delivered by someone who is smarter than me. Intellectual prowess, knowledge, and experience. All of it.

It’s not hard to tell that this is the case. Non-BS reveals itself fairly quickly. BS can hide for a while.

That’s an interesting barometer. The longer I am uncertain as to whether I’m dealing with a bullshit operator or the real deal, the more likely I am to be dealing with a bullshit operator. Bearing in mind of course that I may be so stupid that I can’t tell the difference between bullshit and non-bullshit. But even then, I will get smart enough eventually to discard bullshit.

Back to how I react to smart, non-bullshit people.

The reality laughs lesson here for me is that I am grateful to this man for having learned so many hard concepts, learning so many hard real-life lessons, then distilling the knowledge so I can use it. It is really the first time in my life where I have not wanted to immediately be as smart as him. That’s my MO. You know quantum physics? Let me study independently and rival you even though you spent 20 years of your life doing it. I will catch up in three days. Not this time.

I’m finally becoming a grownup. I’m learning humility. I’ve finally started to really see what I was told a long time ago. You can’t subtract from my life. You can only add to it.

If the second-most important thing distracts you from the most important thing, delete it.

Edit (later): I don’t know what my most important thing is. At work, I mean. In life I do.