Hey all.
I’ve been away from reddit for a while. I’ve been busy being pretty immersed in my experiences. I was having a lot of social interactions and I find that nothing else has quite the magnetic pull that they do, especially intense and emotional ones, and I got pretty well sucked into them. So I spent the last few months thinking primarily about my job (which underwent big changes), my hobbies (which are quite illuminating and exciting to me but can also be truly superficial), my relationships (which also were shaken up recently), politics (one human being has 150 billion dollars and I don’t have healthcare - that’s probably not okay), etc. I experienced a lot of anxiety and found a lot of subtle and passive hindrances that I’d been blind to during these last few months. But I also learned a lot about what makes me happy, calm, mindful, and mindless. I’ve undoubtedly spent a lot of time with truly meaningless and mindless things and have spent virtually no time actively practicing wisdom. This is not my first experience with a period like this and I have no good reason to believe it will be my last.
Recently, obviously, being here writing this, I’ve begun to return to a place of contemplation and meditation and, looking back on the last few months, I have a lot to learn and investigate and unpack. It’s like I was acting out a film, and now I’ve taken the role of film critic, except my goal is less about analyzing the content of film and more about deducing the nature of film and video from the footage available.
First on that list of things to analyze is a lingering anxiety about how easily I slipped into a state of very minimal contemplation and meditation and of worldly absorption. I didn’t so much as decide to spend a long while lost in convention as I did simply not resist sliding quickly into it. I find that prolonged periods of introspection and practice exhaust me in one way, and immersive ‘humaning’ exhausts me in a different way, and the last decade has been my bouncing between them for periods of anywhere from a few months to a few years at a time.
Does anyone else experience this? Am I a puny spiritual weakling who cannot resist the temptation to become a mindless drone for more than a year at a time? Do these experiences happen on a different time scale for you? Have you developed techniques to deal with this? Do you consider spending some time mindless (as in, the antonym of mindful or aware) important or even vital to understanding reality? Or is it a sign or failure instead, and a waste of time or even detrimental? Or is it all about the way you spend such time?
And really I’d just be happy to get an update from everyone on what the water’s like for them right now. Just dump some thoughts on me, especially u/nefandi, u/triumphantgeorge, and u/aesiranatman, but everyone else too.
Edit: I apologize if any of my wording here is careless. I trust most of you to be clever enough not to be mistaken by it. I’m a bit like a sleepy cat just woken up in the morning. I’ll need a moment to regain my sharpness.
>Am I a puny spiritual weakling who cannot resist the temptation to become a mindless drone for more than a year at a time?
Mindlessness is probably not beneficial because you can end up making unwise decisions, but living/acting within the world and toward worldly ends isn’t some kind of sin. And it’s not inherently mindless if it is done willfully and purposefully, even just for some pleasure and/or R&R. It’s emotionally draining to spend 100% of your time focused on the long term and giving yourself no short term gratification. So you have to find a balance there, imo.
>Have you developed techniques to deal with this?
Learn more about myself and uncover my unconscious motivations that led me to act in ways that surprised me and that seemed in retrospect to be counterproductive to my larger, more conscious aims. Then try to integrate and manage my motivations/personalities in a way that keeps them from being bottled up and eventually exploding out, while also preventing them from taking over, instead maintaining control over them.
>Do you consider spending some time mindless (as in, the antonym of mindful or aware) important or even vital to understanding reality?
I’d like to think there are degrees of mindfulness and that it’s not so much of a switch that you turn on or off. I try to practice being more mindful when I can because I tend to think that generally, right now in my vision, becoming more mindful in nearly everything is desirable for me. I think this because mindfulness is a form of wisdom and will ensure that I live and act and decide in ways that are more in accord with my vision of the future rather than against that vision - I don’t fulfill this 100% of the time and neither do I expect myself to, rather I expect myself to at minimum keep a steady-state, and ideally continue to improve.
>And really I’d just be happy to get an update from everyone on what the water’s like for them right now. Just dump some thoughts on me, especially u/nefandi, u/triumphantgeorge, and u/aesiranatman, but everyone else too.
I feel like I’ve finished a lot of the initial, “beginner” level work on my spiritual life in the last couple years. I more or less know what I believe and why I believe it. I have a strong sense of the goal and the path. Now I’m in this very practical place that is more about the practice and exploration of those more fundamental steadfast ideas. I’d say I’m slightly distracted by worldly needs lately, but not to a degree that I am backtracking. I’m just keeping my current spiritual level while I establish a certain level of stability/predictability/comfort to my ordinarily life (as previously my life was rather unstable, unpredictable, and uncomfortable in a way that made it harder to focus on spiritual practice), which I firmly believe will in the end serve to support my spiritual life. So even in my worldly focus, I feel I am still spiritually focused.
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2018-07-25 21:41:04 (e301gg5)