On Fame, Fortune and Mortality

Here's some insight I gained during meditation. It has to do with the futility of striving for "fame and fortune", and the very concrete fact that we will all die in the end.

It doesn’t matter if you gain all the fame and fortune in the world. You are still going to die. So, our answer to “why we are on this planet”, along with all the other “spiritual” stuff, cannot be linked to what we do for a living, to what we do “in the human world”. Happiness, meaning, purpose… they cannot be linked to how much we succeed on anything. Not even how much we defeat the “systems”. 

Too often we run after fame and fortune, some measure of “glory” because civilization has convinced us that those who get “somewhere” are “immortalized”. That word is interesting. We remember them for centuries after they have died, we read their words and celebrate their deeds. We even build monuments in their name. But it’s all a farce. No matter how important, famous or celebrated a person is, there is no way to attain “immortality”. Everyone dies. From the most wealthy, to the most basest beggar. We live and we die.

It is actually one of the poisonous beliefs of civilization, one of its working principles. That “immortality” can be achieved by compliance to … something. God, king, nation, art. That if we get somewhere, we can outlive our time on this Earth.

No such luck.

It is important to separate our desire to do something with our time here from our often unquestioned belief that the greatness of the something will bring us worthiness or eternity. We all want to feel “worthy” and indeed we wouldn’t be reaching for worthiness through our careers if society provided it in some other way. Never before had people been shamed by the prospect of being a “nobody”. Our need for some basic recognition is legitimate. But the way to get it is not excellence in any chosen field.

Similarly, we all have to contend with the fact that death is the only certainty we have in life. That applies to all of us, rich and poor, famous and “nobodies”. True, more people cried the death of Elizabeth Taylor than my own granddad’s. So? Death is death for everyone. The question is, “how did you feel while you were alive?” And second to that comes, “what did you do while you were alive?”. My granddad did not “achieve” much in popular terms. He held the same low type job for decades. But he was a cheerful fellow who took pleasure in very long walks, books, cooking and abundant conversation. My dog loved him, and she was a tough one.

What is my point? I don’t have one. Ok, yes, I do. It’s this: our first goals must be internal. Or spiritual. We must feel remotely happy independently of what happens in our lives.

It’s easy to absorb “toxic” concepts from our environment and not notice that we are living as if they were true. The belief that we will not really die if we become rich and famous is one of them. You probably don’t actually “believe” that you will be immortal per se. But me personally? I carry on under the delusion that I’ll be richer and more famous in the future, and that that will somehow make the present better. How does that work? Because I subconsciously believe that in the future my life will be so much better that it will make my present life more "alive". When you consider that I will not, by definition, have “more life” as time goes by, then I’m working under the premise that “fame and fortune” will give me life in and of itself.

Ok, yes, this is complicated and I don’t know how to explain it any better.

And worthiness? Well, I live my life feeling completely and utterly unworthy, safe in the belief that I’ll be rich and famous in the future and that will make me worthy of living on this planet, worthy of people’s time, worthy of people’s love.

But of course, that’s not how it works. I could be crowned Empress of the Discworld tomorrow, which would be pretty cool. But it would not make me feel any more worthy, because that is something I have to resolve for myself. I have to give my own worth, nobody can do that for me. Not even Terry Pratchett.

Now, if only I could follow my own advice...

My Experience with Meditation: Disciplining Your Thoughts

Meditation is, as far as I can tell, about being in the present. Since no two moments are alike, every meditation will be different. And yes, this can be a pain in the backside. I thought I had “cracked it”, that I had found a nice cushy way of meditating and “doing it right”. No such luck. There doesn’t seem to be much in terms of technique, and so you are never going to have the same experience twice, or arrive to the same place. What follows is a type of “framework” for interacting with my thoughts which I found useful at the beginning.

It’s all about seeing your thoughts as children. This may not be such a far stretch as we think. After all, people often refer to their ideas as their “brainchild”. So, imagine every thought you have as a child, tugging on your shirt wanting to be entertained. Except that it’s not one thought-child but many, and instead of tugging on your shirt they are throwing water balloons around the house. And they’ll carry on doing it until you pay attention to them. So you rush to pay attention to one while another is already filling up more water balloons. Pretty soon the house is a mess and you are at your wits ends.

So what do you do? Well, you calmly and politely tell them to wait; you say “not now, I’m busy at the moment”. Your thoughts are like attention seeking little devils who want to have their way now.

That is what I've learned through meditation: how to discipline your thoughts so that they know when it’s right for them to be entertained and when it’s not.

After meditation, you can sit down with a piece of paper and say to your thoughts “ok, I’m ready to listen to you now, what is it that you wanted to say?”. Then you discover that a lot of thoughts just wanted to be acknowledged, so that by looking at them and letting them know you have noticed their presence, they just disappear.  Which can be  disappointing, if, like me, you were hoping for some enriching “ranting”, I mean, “enlightening exchange of ideas”.

  

See, it takes more effort to have them running around demanding your attention while you try to keep the house from collapsing. If you learn to make space for the thoughts to be listened to when you are ready, then both of you can interact in a way that is of most benefit to everyone.

I feel this approach might be more useful than the traditional Buddhist “thoughts don’t matter, try to disintegrate them, but kindly”. If thoughts don’t matter, then why are they there? Why am I having them? This principle leaves me feeling like a numpty for daring to think what I think. And that’s where I draw the line, because I like my thoughts. That is why I think them. That is why I created them.

What I want is to make them “work for their keep”, in other words, I want to interact with them when I can turn them into political writing. What I don’t want is for them to invade and colonize my mind so that I’m thinking about the merits of my race, and its political implications while I’m having a shower. I don’t want to wax non-lyrically about the bullying tactics of the Right while I’m about to do my meditation.

Because yes, that is what my mind entertains itself with, most of the time.

My Experience With Meditation: Identifying Your Thoughts

a.k.a.: in which you discover that my mind is actually quite shallow.

After I became aware of the fact that my mind is was of thoughts buzzing on an almost constant basis, I realised something even worse: none of these thoughts had anything to do with me. My mind was busily considering ideas and thoughts that were not related to me or my life in any way.

The first kind of thought I flagged as “non mine” was tv related. This came as a shock, and a very uncomfortable one at that. I realized, painfully, that a lot of my thoughts came straight from things I’ve seen on the telly. Oh, the shame! And here I was thinking my mind was so pure from all the telly-nonsense!

After that one, came the other big type of thought that had nothing to do with me: politics. I realized my mind spends about ninety percent of its time thinking about the system, economics, patriarchy, politicians, the welfare state, the state, property, labour, exploitation, alienation, commodification… I could go on. About ninety percent of the time. Most of my mind used up to think about things that have, again, nothing to do with me.

How did I approach this during meditation? Well, after I managed to create a “gap” between one thought and the other, I could sit on that gap and identify the thoughts before and after.

That gave me a sense of perspective: instead of a mind that kept going, like a ship-engine “politics, politics, politics, tv, politics, internet, politics, politics, bastards at work, politics”, my mind did this: “politics, politics, politics, tv, GAP, politics…”. Once I knew that there was a gap, where no tv, or politics, or anything else went through, I could look back at the rest of the train of thought and flag “tv” as “tv” and later on “politics” as “politics”.

If it had the “politics” flag, I would draw back to the breath and say to myself, “that is not about me”. That was the start of what I now think of as “disciplining the thoughts”.

You may wonder, why should we bother disciplining the thoughts? Simple: because it gives you clarity, it helps you think better.

In one aspect, this is somewhat instinctive: we know that if we spend time with one thought only we are going to get further than if we spend that same amount of time going backwards and forwards with dozens of different thoughts.

But it’s more than that. It’s about knowing when to think about something, and when not to. When it’s time to engage with a thought because it will be productive and when it’s time to keep a thought, or even all thoughts, at bay because you need to take a moment to just “be there”.

This is how I learnt in the first person what “mindfulness” was all about even before I had found the concept. I’ll describe it in more detail in the future, it is really important. But in short: mindfulness is about being aware of the present moment.

For now, try to think of your thoughts as children.

My Experience with Meditation: What Is It About?

This is how I understand meditation based on my experience. At first, nothing happened. I knew I had to clear my mind, and the first times I tried, I didn’t understand what “clearing your mind” even meant. Now I realise what was happening there: my mind was so full of thoughts, I couldn’t see any space between one thought and the next one

Imagine a very busy motorway with many lanes. Each car is a thought, and the motorway is your mind. The thoughts keep coming and going, one after the other at top speed and with almost no space between them. It’s like a constant stream. After you sit during meditation long enough, all the thoughts that were trying to get through have done so, and they begin to show up less often. Here’s what happens: when you sit down and just let your thoughts come and go, eventually you run out of thoughts.

This is part of the process, but there’s more. When too many thoughts are running too fast through your mind, you cannot interact with any of them. You are thinking, but only on the surface, because there is another thought coming shortly afterwards and you have to interact with that one as well. Going back to the car metaphor, you cannot see the details of the car, the shape, the people inside it, what they are doing. Now, if only one car shows up every so often, and it is going slowly, you can notice much more about it.

But wait, there’s still more. When you have so many thoughts, you need many lanes. When there’s only one thought every so often, you only need one. So instead of splitting your attention into many places at once, you focus only on one thought at a time.


But there’s more still. If you manage to get the cars to drive really, really slow, you can get much, much closer to them. And here lies the key to changing your life. Or rather, the key to start interacting with your life so that you can change it.

Try and remember this, it’s important. I have to remind myself every day, it is a difficult thing to accept. You can only change things in the present.
And you can only change things when you are really, really aware of the most infinitesimal detail, because you can only change the details.
Thinking about “how to change things” isn’t helping because it’s taking you away from where you are now. And you need to look at the place where you are now in order to understand why you’re there. And most importantly, how to get out.

Yes, I’m in a cell and yes, I want to escape as quickly as possible. But in my case, I locked myself in there. And trying to escape by using a spoon may not be the best way out when I carry the key in my pocket.

This is not the best way to explain the meditation process, I know. And I'm not using a good metaphor, so think about this account as a first draft on the topic.

My Experience with Meditation: From Needing To Starting

I had been trying to meditate for quite some time. I’ve long suspected that I really needed it.

Let me see… it must have been some time after I graduated, and after I had started questioning “The Myth of Science”. Somewhere along the way, starting from political awareness and arriving to spiritual awareness, I must have come across the idea of meditation. It must have had something to do with the whole “clear your mind” thing.

So yes, I have known for quite some time that I needed it badly. After discussing with a friend how my attempts at meditating have resulted in utter failure, he reassured me that that was the surest sign that I needed it. But all of this is boring, let’s get to the part when I talk about meditation.

So, one day, I sat down on the bed and tried to clear my mind. It didn’t work. I kept falling from drowsiness. So I tried again, and the same thing happened. Drowsiness; desire to go to sleep. I looked up sleepiness during meditation, and I learned that it was normal, but no mention on how to prevent it.

Time went by and I accidentally stumbled unto Havi’s blog. Havi is a yoga teacher, and she uses a technique called “Shiva Nata”. After reading over and over how good this practise was for bringing “epiphanies”, I decided to give yoga a try. I found some videos.

One was mental. I tried it with my boyfriend, but neither of us could bend so much or stand so still. The other was more normal, more “beginner friendly”. And it had a section on meditation.

The presenter gave this bit of advice, which made all the difference: Sit straight. The spine must be straight, in order for you to channel something or other and root it on the ground. Anyway, he said not to slump and sit straight. So I did.

He also explained how you should breath during meditation: deeply and slowly. After a while, he said that you breathing should, naturally and without any action on your part, become quieter. And mine did, kinda.

It must have been in the middle of this guided meditation when I felt something. Nothing great, nothing life-changing. In fact, I had forgotten about it until just now. The presenter was asking us to imagine the chakras, and when he got to the one in the head, I felt something. Good.

I then went on to keep up with his yoga positions, and eventually gave it up in favour of doing just meditation. I suspect I should be doing both, really, and I'm sure I'll return to yoga when things calm down. But now, I'm in the middle of a process, and I have no idea where it's taking me.