The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
I took the train yesterday from Columbia, S.C. to New York City to visit my daughter.
It’s also the first leg of my crazy adventure in potential repatriation.
Next stop, Portland, Oregon…a destination I will also reach by train…a very long train.
All these train rides give a person like me a dangerously large amount of time to think.
Along the way I finished a book entitled Waking Up by Sam Harris, the best-selling author, atheist philosopher, and neuroscientist.
It’s one of those books that I’ll probably need to re-read in order to really understand.
He seems real enough…after all, I can hear him. He hardly ever shuts up.
In other words, we’re conditioned, or brain-washed, by that little fucker to the point where it’s virtually impossible to know, or to be consciously aware, of the fact that I am just thinking.
The little man is constantly telling me that I’m bored, or hot, or cold, or uncomfortable, or pissed off, or this, or that…
Harris, on the other hand, tells me that this is really all an allusion.
That what’s really real, that the ONLY THING that’s really real, is consciousness…
and all the rest of it, all those constant thoughts, are just transient incidents floating by on that stream.
As I was riding the train and reading, Harris suggested an analogistic exercise.
He told me to look out the window and see.
I did…it was quite nice as we were passing a beautiful forest somewhere in Virginia, I think.
Then he told me to look closer…I did and a faint image of me appeared.
Then he said, look beyond that image. I did and it disappeared.
The point?…
That upon closer examination, the separate or dualistic “I” really isn’t there at all.
What’s there is my consciousness…that’s it.
So what, you might be asking.
After I read that I looked around and saw that my fellow passengers were busily following the instructions of that little man.
Most of them frantically fingering the keyboards of their mobile devices (like I am right now)…
in the desperate attempt to fight off the boredom of a 15 hour train ride.
But if we ignore that little man, perhaps boredom doesn’t exist either.
And ignoring him (or her…I don’t mean to appear sexist) makes perfectly good sense, owing to the fact…
that she’s not even there!
She’s a product of the brain’s unlimited capacity to imagine, or conjure up, all kinds of shit that isn’t really there.
Much of that due to the amygdala, the part of the brain that developed early on, in order to help us run away from saber-tooth tigers desiring to have our ancestors for lunch.
Harris suggests that quieting that little man, via some practice of meditation, is the key to a real experience of life…
of conscious life.
And to the disappearance of the stuff that makes us miserable…
and at times, dangerous.
Stop obeying the often conflicting instructions of that non-existent little blabber-mouth living inside your head.
image credit: desermeaux.christy via Compfight cc
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