No morning meditation today. Need to get to office earlier. I’ll either do it in the office or this evening when I come back home.
Did fit in the next push-ups workout.
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Hey. What can I say?
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Sticking with my Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday subliminal play schedule.
So, I’ll be going again tomorrow.
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Evening meditation.
9:55 pm to 10:55 pm
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May I ask if you have tips on meditation? I struggle to clear my mind/not fall asleep, only managed at most 10min with a timer and image in my head (and still fighting off other thoughts).
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Sure, I’ve got tips and opinions.
Meditation is like hiking, mountain climbing, swimming, or diving.
There are some general principles that will be helpful no matter what. But there are also many different reasons to do those things; many different locales in which to do them; many different techniques that one can apply for this reason or that reason; there are many different teams or groups one may join or be affiliated with to do those activities (and the group you join will tend to influence what you think of as the ‘right’ ways to do them), and so on and so on.
Pretty broad field.
But still, everybody’s got tips and opinions.
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It doesn’t have to be difficult. Just like hiking. Sure you can climb Mt. Whitney. Or you can just go hiking in a summer field. They’re both hiking. At the peak of Mt. Whitney, there’ll be some things you can see and do that you can’t do anywhere else. But, also, in that summer field, there’ll be some things that are not up on Mt. Whitney too.
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You’re already better at meditating than you think you are.
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Take something that you already love to do. And then (safely of course) practice paying attention to what it feels like to do that thing, and noticing more and more of the details of what is involved in doing it. This can be just about anything.
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Do some mixture of formal and informal ‘meditation practices’. Formal would be like your ‘training hikes’. “Today we’re going to go for 2.5 miles up this particular hill or mountain.” “We’re going to keep a particular pace, and so on.” But then, informal is just like, 'Hey, the moon looks good. Let’s go take a walk and enjoy the evening for a bit" kind of thing.
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What are you naturally curious about in the world? Medicine? Biology? Fruit bats? 17th century Baroque classical music? Cars? Government meetings? Sand? Elementary school education? Professional wrestling? What do you find interesting? Let yourself go and get into those things whatever they are. Let it be in an open-ended way. Just see what you find and what you learn. As you do that, you are meditating. Then bring that attitude back to the cushion.
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If you’re up for it, ask this question, ‘What the heck am I?’ Yeah, yeah. I know people have given you 1000 answers to that question. But until you know for yourself, anything you’ve been told is just a story. So, ask it for yourself. But ask it not just with talking. Ask with your body, and try to see if you can explore for answers with your body. If I asked you what a snake feels like, you’d have to check with your body. Or if I asked you what watermelon sorbet tastes and feels like, you’d have to check with your body. Contrary to what we’ve been taught, our body can think very intelligently. So, ask this question with your body, ‘What the heck am I?’ And allow yourself to explore that question through feeling and attending.
Treat it like jogging. When you get tired, just stop for a while. Then keep asking again.
This isn’t kindergarten. There’s not one answer to everything. Some questions are worth asking over and over again.
Okay. That’s enough opinions for now.
Oh, you can meditate with aids. You can put on music. Just listen to a song for 10 or 15 minutes. If you like, you can explore what hearing is and what music is, by listening.
Alright, enough.
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Thanks! That’s quite different from the no-thought-in-mind I’d thought it would be
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- Make sure that fixation on the meditation instructions does not eclipse the meditation itself. The substance is more important than the instructions.
Here is a jello mold with liquid jello inside:
We use the mold because, until the jello cools and hardens into shape, it cannot hold its shape without support.
Here is a statue with scaffolding:
We build the structure around the statue to stabilize it and/or to allow the workers to access various parts that will help to stabilize and refine the statue.
Meditation instructions and meditation objects are the jello mold and the scaffolding. The purpose is only to stabilize your attention until it can maintain its proper course. But the mold and the scaffolding are not the purpose or the goal of meditation. They’re just tools to be used to help meditation.
Eventually, a time will come when you’re not even using those instructions anymore. And then later still, a time will come where you start using them again because you find them useful again. But they’re not ‘the point’.
- Another one: basic neuroscience. Not sure if you’re into this kind of thing or not. But if you are, thinking about neural function is an easy way to support your meditation practice. Did you ever watch your parents or some other adult (or even older sibling) work on something when you were a child? Like some craft or task that they were able to do, but that you did not yet understand and were not yet able to do?
Well, common discourse tells us that the world is external with all of its phenomena and all of its appearances. The blue sky. The white moon. The crowded, noisy bus. The empty brown building.
They and their attributes are all ‘external’. We grow up imagining that the purpose of our ‘senses’ is just to passively receive the characteristics and attributes that exist externally in the world.
But when you learn even a little bit of basic neuroscience, you start to realize that the brain is a complex system that generates (among many other things) sensory and perceptual constructs.
If you think about this and vibe with it, then you can actually sit down (or stand or walk) and watch your nervous system “creating” experience, the same way that you may have watched your mother drawing a picture, or watched your father mowing the lawn or whittling a wooden sculpture, or whatever you watched as a child. You can watch your own nervous system, your own mind, in the same way.
(‘Wow. Watch what it’s making now.’)
Eventually, as you do this, you’ll find that there are literally no distractions because every emotion, perception, feeling is just one more amazing creation that your mind has skillfully produced. If your goal is to observe reality, there can be no distractions, because what could come to you that is not reality?
Anyway, those were just some more observations.
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This meditation talk is funny. Because I just had the chance to meditate this morning again a few hours ago.
I had a 10 am meeting scheduled today, and I was able to meditate from 8:43 to 9:43 and to then quickly shower and hop online for the meeting. Meeting went until 11:15, and now I’m going to add a little food to me, and then get out the door to go work in the office.
I had the feeling to listen to BUILD subliminal first today. Will do that.
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I’m sleep-deprived today and am pretty tired, so I’m going to forego subliminal listening. Hope that by Thursday, I’ll have gotten better sleep. And I’ll try to come back with greater energy.
I am also preferring to use subliminals as part of a outine that includes vigorous aerobic exercise. In my case, I’m choosing the rowing machine. I’ve had that routine interrupted for the last few weeks, but I think that by next week, we’ll be back in business.
So, I’m disappointed, but I’m going to wait a little longer to play subs again. They are to serve me. Not vice versa. So, it’s on me to get the factors and the conditions right.
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Less sleep-deprived today.
Got maybe 6 hours of sleep. Woke up and then meditated from 6:33 to 7:33. After that laid down a little while longer. Eventually made breakfast and got out the house by 11 something.
I have a meeting tonight from 7 to 9:30, and I’m not quite prepared, so I’m spending today on that.
I am finding myself reflecting on and generating ideas about the projects, aspirations, questions, ambitions, and so on, that are represented by my The Malkuth Catharsis stack.
These considerations are such an organic part of my life that it’s a little difficult and maybe ludicrous to try to tease out the specific influence of the subliminals at this time. Yet I do feel intuitively that they are making a significant contribution.
I feel, for example, that I am being somewhat more effective than I might normally be.
There are plans and ideas swirling around.
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There are so many things going on at the same time right now. Work makes the largest footprint. Which is normal.
But my aim is to get things to a place where my overall lifestyle is sustainably organized around and aligned with my personal priorities, values, and passions.
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Evening meeting went pretty well.
Now, hopefully, I’ll get enough sleep tonight, and return to subs tomorrow.
But the weird thing is, I do feel that I’ve been continuing to have deeper and subtler expressions of my subliminal programs. Very interesting. Action is the gateway that allows the subliminals to express. If you’re not taking action, there’s probably not much point in worrying about playing more and more subs.
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Back to it today.
Funny, these days I’m getting the urge to stop around 2:30.
Happened with both programs today. Went a little longer with BUILD. But still got that feeling around 2:30.
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Time to meditate.
Then it’s off to the office for my only meeting of the day.
I think last night was the dividing line between being taken away from my routine and being able to get back to most of my valued, prioritized tasks.
Will be trying to get back on point with things starting today.
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I felt like I had more bandwidth and desire to play.
I played BUILD from 3:05 to 7:34
and PHENOMENAUT Genesis from 2:36 to 6:34
For now, going forward, I’m going to keep using my intuition and observation to guide my listening. I’ll see how today’s plays seem to impact me over the next two days, and then I’ll proceed from there on Saturday.
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I tried to do this workout first thing in the morning on Wednesday. But I got to about 52 or so and just stalled out.
Rested two days came back and got it done.
One step at a time.
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Often in life,
The opposite of an untruth…
is also untrue.
A clock is set to 12:00, and that is not the right time;
So you move the hands of the clock to the opposite side: 6:30…
and that is still not the right time.
To learn what is true or real, put down the arguments of right vs wrong, and go to check directly.
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