August 6th, 2006
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On the level of self and accomplishment, as we learn how our mind works, we can begin to use tools to achieve change and betterment in our lives. We can learn to focus better, make more money, lose weight, eat better, etc. Not only that, we can use the same tools to further our meditation and connection to being. There are many facets to living an optimal life.
We do want to be careful that we don’t get too attached to that betterment. Self and ego are attached to these wants, so we need to watch how we apply the tools I’ll be talking about today. But the tools are very useful nonetheless.
Today’s show will be a brief overview of the power of Intention Setting, Hypnosis, Neural Linguistic Programming, Hemi Sync, Goal Setting and Positive Thinking. All of these “technologies” affect our opinions and beliefs, and hence our perception of the world.
Referenced: Tony Robbins
July 24th, 2006
We lose loved ones all the time. We hope for an afterlife. The self wants to grow and be powerful and young. It is completely opposed to it’s own extinction. So there is fear and panic around the thought of death for many. In fact, many people can’t even discuss it. But all living things seem to pass away. How do we deal with that?
Today we’re going to talk about death of the body, but also death of the self. We’ll talk about how meditation relates to death, and how putting your life in perspective can be meaningful. We’ll talk about the death of others and how to deal with that. We’ll talk about the desire for an afterlife, and how death really makes everything deeply meaningful. Death is a part of life, so let’s talk about it.
We’ve discussed in the past, that we are not only self. We are also in some way connected to everything. Can that other identity help us deal not only with our own death, but also the death of others, and finally other types of change as well?
All living things die. But we can expand the idea of death from there. Situations die, friends change, we get divorced. All of these things are mini-deaths. We “die” in a different way as well. I am not the same 10 year old boy I once was. That boy is gone forever. So we are all changing. Everything is in a state of change. Death s a kind of change.
Meditation actually teaches us a death of self. We are putting down the ego and just identifying with the big mind. You obviously don’t actually die, and you can retain your “self” as much as you wish, but each time you enter this other mind, you will see it is a death of self in that moment. You will find that this type of practice can change you fundamentally. It can make you more able to deal with change, and hence your own death, and the death of others.
Truly being in the Now is about not thinking about the future. The entire thing is to watch the mind that wants to leave this moment. So in that, the Now becomes much fuller. Our entire attention is on it, and it becomes rich and thick. The understanding of this type of mind leads spiritual leaders to talk about eternity. Many talk about no death, in the death of self. So the temporary idea of you, or your ego, dies in that moment. And what is born is a fuller understanding of timelessness, or eternity.
Pulling away from your life and looking at it on a time line is very helpful and can put your life into a different context. Often we find ourselves just drifting along, but all events are precious, so it can be useful to find that context and check in.
There’s an old saying, or it might have been a viral email that went around way back, about filling a jar with a marble for every year of your life expectancy, and removing one on your birthday. It shows the significance of our lives. That could potentially give a deeper context to your life as well.
The desire for an afterlife comes from the mind that that is unhappy and wants salvation. It also may have been used as a carrot and stick for controlling people. But whether that’s true or not, it is really important to expose the mind that craves a better future, the ultimate of which would be a glorious afterlife.
We think that to stay moral, our culture needs to be held in a “proper space” with the appropriate carrot and stick. Meaning, if I were to take away the idea of living a good life being the thing that gets us into heaven, people might begin to behave poorly because there’s no point in behaving well. The idea of putting down the external carrot and stick scares many people. They immediately image anarchy and insanity ensuing from removing those guidelines. But a sincere morality comes from seeing the beauty that’s here, not a future hoped for beauty.
We need to become OK with who we are, without the hope for a prize. Because fear of not getting the prize does not work as our motivation. Fear based morality will not work. The example of extremists who die to get to heaven also cause great pain and suffering. They want the “prize” too much. Their morality is quite different, but also belief based. Either type of morality doesn’t seem to be working. To be clear, I’m not attacking peoples beliefs necessarily, I’m just saying that the mind that thinks about salvation, or hopes for it, or gets attached to it, is not the healthiest mind. It is ego based, and fear based. Seeing the beauty right in front of us, rather than being controlled by fear will work much better.
Death of others is very hard to deal with. It is very hard to lose a family member or loved one. We are attached to permanence, which doesn’t exist. This is a fault of the egoic mind. While losing things we care about will always be hard, I want to point out that the natural desire for permanence can make dealing with death and change even more difficult. If we realize that nothing is permanent, then we don’t have unrealistic expectations around things like a loved one dying. We need to learn to face non-permanence.
Fear of death and the unknown is enormous. But death makes everything matter. Living forever would take value away from lots of things. You’d be able to take literally forever to master things, so being a master chef as an example would have little meaning. We’d constantly be approaching everyone knowing everything, with no risk because we’d have forever to fix any problems, etc. It would be a very different existence for sure. Certainly different than most people would fantasize. Death is a part of life, and it is something we’ll do well to get more comfortable with.
Show Music: Live At Tonic by Christian McBride
July 16th, 2006
We’re going to discuss what addiction is, and then talk about how we can come to terms with it and what can we do to stop it. To do this, I’ll talk about addiction, in broad terms. Then we’ll do a quick exercise that might help you find what your addictions are. This could be considered an addiction "workshop", albeit a very short one. Then we’re going to discuss the different quality of being that allows for better choices. That state of mind, one of presence, can help us end addiction.
What is addiction? Addiction lives on the pleasure pain level of being. So there will be lots of references to good and bad in this podcast. What are the different addictions? Drugs and drinking and smoking, of course, but also watching TV, shopping, eating sugary foods, and working out. Some of these are obviously better for you than others. Some are manageable, and some aren’t. Ultimately, addiction can end up really ruining a person, but it’s ugliness doesn’t have to wait for that extreme. All forms of addiction stem from a choice in attention.
I talk about the unhappiness that becomes so big that we end up choosing to drink or drug because we can’t face the pain. The problem with this is that the problems grow. We’re Pavlovian, and want to move toward pleasure. So it is a slippery slope to not become addicted on some level. It’s important to watch how we manage our lives.
What happens when we’re addicted? While responsibilities are piling up, they become completely unmanageable. We need the courage to face that, and it’s very hard to do. We usually aren’t motivated enough unless there is enough pain.
How do we stop addiction? What is the different quality of being that allows for change? I mention the conscious use of pain, and also the use of being awake. Those two things will allow us to quit our addictions.
Pain is the reason we change or stop. It may seem odd that pain may also be the reason we started. That makes sense when we realize that in the beginning, the thing that makes us feel good hadn’t become painful yet. So how painful is your addiction? Can we make our pain unacceptable before it truly becomes unbearable? That would be like getting free from addiction early.
So here’s how to stop. You must go into the feeling of the addiction. When you are faced with that moment of choice, which you’ve just become aware of, how do you make a different choice? You feel into the feeling of conflict. You breathe into it. In that moment you give yourself enough space to make a different decision. If you choose poorly, just gather data and don’t beat yourself up. Becoming aware allows us to see the moments. Those moments, when we see them, we have the power to get free. We can’t face all our problems at once, we need to face them one at a time. So this is a constant vigil. This conflict and the needed attention to it will soften over time.
In conclusion, we need to realize the pain addiction is causing us, and that needs to become greater than the pleasure it gives us.
June 19th, 2006
It seems many people want to get the idea of what enlightenment looks like. We’re all trying to "figure it out." I get many emails discussing understanding these ideas. This podcast is about doing them instead.
The "Now" has become very trendy. So let’s not get lost in ideas about it. We even have great philosophical minds telling us we don’t have time to be in the now, which is a bit ridiculous. What I think they are saying is that we shouldn’t be trendy about the Now.
Because we can play with words and ideas and labels at this level we should see that we will never "figure it out." Rather we should look at the desire that we have to figure it out. The idea of how to do this is less important than doing it. Our minds want to become experts, and so we look at all the possibilities of "getting lost" so that we can be sure that we will win "when those things show up." But that state of mind is already lost. The waiting, thinking, planning mind is exactly the mind we are trying to put down.
Someone comes across the idea of being at peace. And they are listening to these podcasts, and trying to meditate. And they realize they are not at peace. The mind that is trying to get to peace is lost in time. The mind that wants to "DO" peace is the mind that puts down expectations. This may feel very unnatural to us. We want to figure it out instead.
So when we "DO" peace, when we allow for peace of mind by coming to this moment, whatever it is, we are doing it "all the time". Because we start to realize that now is all there is.
The important concept is this: getting to this moment "is the end of it", EVEN if we leave this moment. Sounds like a cop out, and is hard to get your mind around, but it’s the truth.
So let’s look at the actuality of living in the Now. We don’t care if we can do it permanently, because that is another idea. We just want to do it now. When we come to the Now in this moment (whenever that is), we realize that this moment is always here. So that is all we have to do. The mind will kick up again and say things like "You won’t be able to do that in the future." And that may even knock us off a bit, but seeing that once we DO come back, there is no tally of how long we’ve been gone. So doing it now IS doing it forever. Because the illusion is the mind that creates a future that doesn’t exist.
So doing it in the now is as simple as coming to what you are, your breath, this moment, the sounds, the fears, the whatever, without worrying if you can do it again later. If you’re doing it now, you’re doing it forever.
Referenced: Pema Chodron, Eckhart Tolle
May 22nd, 2006
Making any kind of change is very difficult when we aren’t truly committed to it. So what is commitment and how do we find it?
I see people use meditation and become spiritual all the time to feel better when they are sad. But they often drop the practice once things get better. Finding commitment is hard to do, but we don’t want to get caught in the common loop of: being in pain, working to escape it, forgetting we were in pain. We can’t really escape pain fully until we learn to stay committed to change through all seasons.
Can you practice stillness when the world is good too? Can you “sacrifice” to try to stay awake at all times? This is not meant to imply that being awake isn’t fun. It’s only meant to show that commitment is necessary for lasting change.
How can we stay committed? We can use anchors. We can surround ourselves with books and podcasts and ideas that support our goals. We can commit to practicing meditation. But what is the thing underneath? It might just be our pain itself. Finding your reason to stay committed is really important. What happened to you that got you started down this road? What pain happened to you? Make a point of holding on to that.
People often mention that we can’t change other people. I disagree. We are all connected and intertwined. A change from you affects me. So if there is learning, if there is change, then we can point to something. We can find the “ah ha!” we can turn on a light switch for people.
In this talk, the light switch is the idea that being committed makes change easy. Finding commitment can be hard, but once we find it quitting smoking, eating differently, losing weight, meditation, all become simple. So what’s your reason to stay committed? Make that an “ah ha!” for you. Create new grooves of thought. Be awake to your pain. Change.
