To understand mindfulness (of a certain meditative type) you have to understand the issue of Subject-Object duality.

Subject-Object duality is a vestige of our predatory nature: a life-form (such as you) eyes (sees) another life-form; zooms in, focuses, attends… to see if this other life-form is fit to eat; subject-object duality is born: “I” want “it.”  This is our evolutionary past: our attention evolved to track patterns.

To attend is to objectify, to turn an aspect of reality into an “object,” into a “thing.”  When you objectify an aspect of your environment at the very same time you are also objectifying yourself, turning your unconditional sense of being into a “thing” called “self.”  Indeed, to attend to the Other is to distill yourself into a stand-alone Self out of the oneness of what surrounds you. Immersed in all that is at a baseline, we pop out of this anonymity of mindlessness as soon as we begin to track and hunt patterns.

We are first and foremost informational hunter-gatherers.

Smoking, as you well know, is a hard habit to break. What makes this seemingly simple behavior so difficult to quit, from a behavioral standpoint, is the sheer amount of conditioning that goes into installing the habit.  If you smoke a pack a day, you take an average of 160 puffs per day!

The stupefyingly high frequency of smoking behavior can only compete with breathing, walking, and eating. Indeed, can you think of anything else you tend to do at least 160 times a day, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year?

Furthermore, smoking, as a habit, has a tremendously wide conditioning footprint. Smoking is connected to just about everything: to a whole gamut of emotions; to a variety of places, people, and things; to a range of activities, such as eating, thinking, reading, driving, and having sex. So, if you think of smoking as a kind of psychological cobweb, its strands are everywhere, and its triggers linger in every corner of a smoker’s life.

But here’s the kicker: traditional smoking-cessation programs give you only about two weeks to extricate yourself from this psychologically sticky web.  That is, most of these programs recommend that you set a quit date two weeks from the time you start your quit efforts.

For some people, this two week timeline makes sense.  Perhaps you’ve had previous quit attempts, you’ve learned some coping strategies, and you are highly motivated to leave cigarettes behind for good.

For many others, however, two weeks to quit constitutes a rush job that ultimately sets you up for failure.  Our advice?

Continue reading… »

Here’s a thought from Reinventing the Meal that may “illuminate” your eating a bit:

All energy on this planet – one way or another – is a sun-product.  So, as you fill up your shopping cart, try to mentally track the connection between any given foodstuff and its relationship to the sun.  Plants are, of course, easy.  It’s nearly automatic to envision them outside, basking in the sun, and soaking up the energy of light.  Animals are a bit harder.  Protein powders are even more obscure.  Try nevertheless.

Retrace the steps of the biochemical metamorphosis: planet turns, light hits a sprouting blade of grass, the grass grows tall enough to be noticed by the mowing jaws of a grazing calf, the calf grows into a cow, the cow becomes a steak, the steak becomes your body, your body fuels your mind as you think this very thought.  Bam!  The energy of light has finally reached you.

Feel the touch of the sun as your consciousness ponders your own connection to it.

To reiterate, not all foods are equally “enlightened” – while some are in direct touch with the sun, others are a few steps of  food-processing distance away from the sun.  So, try tracking the “enlightenment” of your food for a bit of your own self-illumination.

Resources: share your mindful eating moments with Mindful Eating Tracker

Asparagus photo available from Shutterstock.

Each life is an eternity of its own: we can’t remember when we weren’t alive (because we weren’t yet) and none of us will know when we are no longer (because we won’t be alive to know that we are no longer alive).  As far as we are concerned, we have always been alive and… we will always be alive, in a personally-subjective sense, which is all that matters in the matters of immortality.

This banal existential truth is a form of personal immortality even if one day you won’t be alive for someone else (which is their business to process).

You are living-and-dying just as you are reading this.  And yet you still are.  This will always be personally the case.  You will always be alive – to yourself – as long as you are alive.  Once again, I am talking about a “personal always,” not an “inter-personal always.”  Inter-personally, that is, socially, sure there will be a time when you are no longer alive.  But for you personally this will never be the case.  Not if I understand anything about how this life works.

Take your time to enjoy your timelessness.

Related post: Immortality Now

Man in field photo available from Shutterstock.

“Indian temples are traditionally built in the image of a human body.  The ritual for building a temple begins with […] planting a pot of seed.  The temple is said to rise from the implanted seed, like a human.  The different parts of a temple are named after body parts.  The two sides are called the hands or wings, the hasta; a pillar is called a foot, pada.  The top of the temple is the head, the sikhar.  The shrine, the innermost and the darkest sanctum of the temple, is a garbhagrha, the womb-house.  The temple thus carries out in brick and stone the primordial blueprint of the human body.” (Ramanujan, 1973, 20).

Nifty.  But unnecessary.

Indian poet Basavanna explains: “The rich will make temples for Siva.  What shall I, a poor man, do?  My legs are pillars, the body the shrine, the head a cupola of gold.  Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay.” (20).

Indeed, why imitate what you already have?  Your body is already a temple.  Why build another one?  Why burn gas to drive your Self to where you are not?  Why not worship at home?  What do I mean by “worship?”  I mean “love.”  However you want to see it – Reality, Creation, Universe, Dao, Cosmos – find a way to connect to it.  From within.  Perhaps, through eating.  Without brokers.

What is mind?

Short answer: mind is just another four-letter word.

Long answer: mind is a body that thinks it is not a body but something separate from it.  Thus, a mind is a deluded body.  Once again: here you are, a “mind,” thinking that you are “in” a “body,” but you aren’t “in” a body.  You are a body, a body thinking that you are a mind, i.e. a body that does not know oneself, a body that thinks it isn’t what it is but something else.  But you aren’t anything else.  You are this body.  That’s all.  I hope it’s enough since there isn’t anything else.

Sure, you can call this “mind” a subtle body, or a body-within-a-body, or an inner body, but a body is still a body even if it’s in the form of a nesting doll set.  You are one, not two, even if you use two words (body and mind) to describe this two-dimensional oneness of yours.

This is a Sunday morning blog which means I just had coffee and looked through the Sunday morning New York Times.  I am telling you this so that you have at least an approximate sense of my psycho-physiological variables of the moment.  In my estimation, these variables of caffeine and news are entirely irrelevant to the point of this bit of writing.

I want to reframe the issue of immortality for you in a manner that makes practical sense.  I am not talking about technical immortality of a life-form that doesn’t die.  I am talking about immortality in a felt sense.

As an existentially oriented therapist, one of my “hidden” agendas is to help people not fear death, which is the same as saying help people learn to live life.  Afraid of dying and not believing in an afterlife, many of us unconsciously chase so-called symbolic immortality. Symbolic immortality is when you work hard to create some kind of legacy that will keep a memory of you alive long after you are gone.  Symbolic immortality is a misnomer: legacy is just an informational footprint. 

Eating is touch.  We first smell (i.e. micro-touch) and then taste (i.e. macro-touch) the environment.  Then, after this sensory kiss, we ingest the environment, and it touches us inside as we let it in deep inside us, like a lover’s tongue. Eating is intimacy between Ego and Eco.  Eating is sex, eating is union, eating is pleasure.  Partake.

Mindful Eating Tracker

What

would

Buddha

do?

Be.

Teilhard de Chardin, who in 1925 coined the term noosphere “to denote the sphere of mind,” offers this on Threshold of Reflection:

“Reflection is, as the word indicates, the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know, but to know oneself; no longer merely to know, but to know that one knows.  By this individualization of [one]self in the depths of [one]self, the living element, which heretofore had been spread out and divided over a diffuse circle of perceptions and activities, [is] constituted for the first time as a centre in the form of a point at which all the impressions and experiences knit themselves together and fuse into a unity that is conscious of its own organization.”

This is one of the most sublime descriptions of mindfulness that I have come across.  Teilhard de Chardin, however, didn’t intend this paragraph as a description of mindfulness.  He was describing “hominization,” i.e. the metamorphosis of a hominid into a human.

But here’s my question to you:  Have you yourself reached this Threshold of Reflection today?