Mindfulness
This is something I’ve struggled with very greatly with over the course of my life. I recently was able to in my mind accept the possibility that I might not be able to envision myself sharing my life with someone else intimately. It was my entire process of making the world digestible that was malfunctioning. The main problem was with what dictated a reasonable means of time to label something expired or not accessible anymore. I basically had no thoughts designed to cease my emotional anticipations. Anticipation is quite the opposite of mindfulness: being absorbed in the present moment in a positive way.
I recently re-watched fight club, and Tyler Durden does a great job of demonstrating the type of mindfulness I feel like I’ve got a slight touch of. “Stop trying to control everything and just let go.” I paid great attention to details at every single moment of my awareness. I mean if you try and conceptualize what being alive means rather than assessing the information you’re provided with, it almost sounds like just being irresponsible for everything in life. It is a way of saying even if you do narrow down the origin of all effects to their causes, you can’t expect to be in control of all their outcomes. Such a mentality in life is very counterintuitive when considering Cartesian rationalization is what dominates modern awareness. It almost sounds like a loser building up a defense for himself to prove he isn’t worthless. But it is very liberating to establish such a connection. Doing so allows you to discover a new type of liberation.
Rather than having an endless list of problems to solve each day, you can substitute in other thoughts that have a positive core purpose. In the time that you exist in awareness it is true to say that we are absolutely free to choose what we do with our thoughts (up to a certain extent). Now if certain types of thoughts have a tendency to start a chain reaction of other similar types of destructive thoughts to spawn, wouldn’t it be nice to stop it before it started? But I’ve often found that I can’t quite diagnose my thoughts to either be the start or end of anything. So instead of being extremely confident in a predicted outcome or so sure that you find the strength to will yourself in that predicted direction, you instead let things be. Tyler was making this point at a silly point because they are about to have a wreck, but it is just done there to hammer away the point that our capacity to predict outcomes is ultimately imperfect.
For most people this is the purpose of what faith serves in their lives. For me I have to exist without a belief in some supernatural positive conclusion, but I’ve now come to the conclusion that when we are going to die we will not see it coming. Considering all the negative incidents in each of our lives we've had no warning beforehand. So there is a reasonable amount of time a person should devote to rationalization, and for me I past that line a long time ago. This is an everyday reeducation I have to give myself to maintain it as a vital part of the checklist I go through before making any decisions. Most of what life will be from here on out will be just a rehash of the information I’ve already digested.
Mindfulness to me is a practice in which a person may engage in once they’ve entered some type of anticipation in which they suspect a chain of negative thoughts to follow. I’ve got a few things I’ve been trying to make it a habit to become attentive to when I need examples of things to supply me with gratitude, happiness, thankfulness, calm, comfort, or entertainment. And not to mentions the fact that I’ve got a pretty good physical routine worked out to hold my awareness in. But as I try to acquire the benefits of these positive modes of thought, I will have moments of discovery again and again in this lifetime in which I will feel I’ve discovered something worth sharing. Since we are by nature social creatures I do not regret being redundant.
But all of this is coming at a very fortunate point in time in which nothing I am connected with has severed itself from me. Mindfulness becomes much more difficult when there is more powerful connections to phenomena that then become distant or inaccessible. That is what the primary piece of Buddhism is built upon. That grasping is ultimately an insatiable condition of being conscious. And so is it with Christianity as well, for once you put all your faith in the infinite manifestation of God, you can find comfort or freedom from all lacking. But being able to do that without a lovely story to accompany it is a bit more difficult. Being able to practice mindfulness and at the same time recognizing your insignificance and abstractness in the universe seems contradictory. But things for us are always facing a contradiction. Because we crave a solution that is inconceivable to our imagination.
After my wreck Tyler Durden pulled me out of my car. “God Damn. Ha ha ha ha! We just had a near life experience!” Indeed.