The Cool Blue Blog

What are you thinking?

I mean, what are you thinking? I ask this because most people are not aware of their thoughts and mostly don't control what they think? Don't believe me? Just try sitting and  concentrating on your breathing for ten minutes. See how quickly thoughts arise that make you forget that you your purpose. And those thoughts: did you decide to think about that? No.

Often, just under the surface, we relive the past. Or we rehearse the future. Or we worry about how we look, or appear to others. Anything but living in the moment.

The appeal of sports and video games is that usually for the time we are doing these things, we are living in the now. And it turns out, this is a powerful experience. But since we don't often characterize what it is about it that makes it powerful, we don't ordinarily attempt to replicate the essence of the experience in the rest of our lives, we just do the sport or play the game again to replicate the experience.

If it was just that we could think and thinking remained in the mental realm, this would not be such a bad thing, I suppose. Or, perhaps, it wouldn't be as bad. But thoughts affect our physiology because we can not separate ourselves really into physical and mental, though many are under the illusion that these are separate.

When we replay a bad experience in our past, we get anxious. So too when we worry about the future. We feel good in a variety of ways when we relive past pleasant experiences or anticipate seeing a loved one. And when we dwell on our aloneness, we can feel anxious.

So what are you thinking? And how is it affecting you? Physically?

When the mystics say we live in a world of illusion, this is partially what they are referring to. Because our memories and our expectations are all illusions with respect to the present moment. The events these thoughts represent do not exist. But the moment we are living in does exist.

But often goes unnoticed.

This is not to say that we should live our lives only in the moment. Clearly we have the capacity to plan and imagine and both these functions we should take full advantage.

But we should strive to get control of how we use our mental capacities rather than letting them have full reign to do whatever. Periodically "checking in" to notice what you are thinking is a good start. Sitting for ten minutes and counting your breaths, 1 to 10, the starting over is a good exercise. If you lose the count, start over.

Gaining control of your relationship to the past, present and future is important if for nothing else, your physical well-being. If you are dwelling on thoughts that make you ill, you should stop doing that if you want to feel well. These subliminal thinking patterns are hypnotic in nature and are a mechanism for programming your brain for good or for ill.

Get control of your thinking patterns and get control of your life.

And as frequently as you can

be here now

On Boredom

My ultimate conclusion of life the universe and everything is that boredom results from people not really believing in the religions they so proudly proclaim themselves apart. But why restrict this to just people who belong to religion?

The trap civilization sets for us is that being relieved of the direct experience of life and death has caused in many the false belief that we are somehow not subject to the laws of the universe. Most people have not experienced the untimely death of a loved one and we certainly do not experience it on a routine basis. And when we do, we have elaborate rituals designed to separate ourselves from it.

We do everthing in our power to separate ourselves from the truth and inevitibility of our death, and by doing so, we actually separate ourselves from life. We do everything in our power to keep ourselves alive. We attempt to employ every medical trick in the book, pay every expense we can afford; demand every service from our governments, employers, priests, shaman's, and hucksters (then of course complain about the cost)  to keep at bay  the  Man with the Scythe.

And we do this because most do not believe there is anything beyond that curtain no matter often we pay lipservice (and tithes) to the religion of our choice.

We live in a spiritual vacuum. There is no purpose.

The result is we have no vision of becomming.

The irony of all of this is that without the knowledge of becomming, the life we so dearly want to extend is empty and void of any meaning. It's boring.

To relieve this boredom we invent all types of distractions to convince us we are living; TV, movies, theatre, art, sexual obsessions and the most powerful

DRAMA.

We love drama in our lives. That really keeps us occupied.

Somebody oppressed us with some minor infraction of a minor social rule and we relate this indignity to all who will listen, create a dust up, affect a feud, start shooting (mostly metaphorically but sometimes not, but it doesn't matter because metaphor can be reality and vice versa. Did I mention that already?), decide it's enough. Sign a truce, shake hands have a party, get drunk have sex in celebration, then start all over again.

Drama. We love drama.

Almost as much as drama we love gossip.

And not just about the people we come in contact with but don't know, but also people we never come in contact with and don't know.

There is no shortage of gossip magazines about people whose lives we hold up on a pedastal because they can sing a good tune or act a good DRAMA on the big (and small) screen.

So that's my take on it.

The spiritual vaccuum that is most people's lives arrests our development to the point of nihilism. But we don't believe in nihilism (well except for Goths) so we do everything we can to avoid being nihilistic.

Only those who see living as an artform and whose time on earth is taken up by perfecting their art have any hope of glimpsing the truth.