There’s a type of vipassana meditation where you note what your attention is on. If you’re seeing images, you say “images”. If you’re talking to yourself, you say “hearing”, etc.

When we are out and about in the world, we usually don’t know what modalities (senses) our thoughts take. We might get an idea that we want a cookie, but we are not very aware that first we saw an image of a cookie, then we felt the emotion we would feel if we ate one, then we say to ourselves “I want a cookie.” All of that happens unconsciously.

Noting meditation brings the modality into our conscious awareness. With each thought that you wrest into the foreground of your mind, little by little, you are gaining understanding into the functions of your own mind. For instance, with enough repetition, you might realize that the cookie pattern is common: for lots of treats, you first see it, then feel it, then say it.

Awareness loosens up habits, so that thought pattern will eventually be loosened down to nothing. It will also give you a clue into how you can reprogram yourself. But that is another topic.

Bottom line: meditation teaches you how your mind works. And a mind that understands itself works better. I don’t know why that should be so, but it is.

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In our culture, honesty is the norm. Lying is the aberration.

But lying is probably more natural. Lying is the Venus Fly Trap that emits a smell like rotting meat. Lying is the tiger’s stripes that hide him in the jungle. Lying is the flower whose sexual parts look like a bee.

In this universe, lying is the norm. Messages only occasionally correspond to anything we would call Truth. This is the way of nature, a law of the universe, and one would be foolish to forget this.

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Most people are constantly afraid of being wrong. I have been accused of being afraid of being wrong a lot–usually during an argument. I used to get upset by it–obviously, if I am defending my position so vehemently, I am not afraid of holding my position, regardless of whether it is right or wrong. It is the people who choose the easy, popular position who are afraid to even listen to my argument–they might be wrong.

But an insightful friend gave me a better explanation that made me realize what “afraid of being wrong” really meant. She said that it was just a cliché label that people have learned to put on a particular situation. That situation is when someone is defending their position–defense being a sign of fear–and the others think they are wrong–because it’s not their expected position. To tie the fear and wrongness together, they say “afraid to be wrong”.

Now, when someone says that I’m afraid to be wrong, I feel sorry for them. I try to politely excuse myself from the conversation. And I make a mental note not to have discussions with them any more.

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I used to think that there was no point in changing. If you want to change how you think, you are by definition defining a stupidity. If you are stupid, what makes you able to choose how you should change? So my reasoning went.

The flaw in my reasoning was that you often have more intelligence than you actually use. You know many things intellectually that you are just not applying to good use. Making the small change to put it to good use would make you more practically intelligent.

The other flaw is that part of becoming smarter is a trial-and-error process. And you’ll never know if some ways of being are better until you try them. You must make your best guess and test it out. If you’re wrong, try something else.

Thus, by the action of your intelligence programming yourself, do you become smarter, more able, more powerful. It is, in a sense, a bootstrapping operation. From humble, infantile beginnings, you learn to operate in the world, with only minimal structure at the outset. Over time, your neural pathways define a relatively stable personality and thought process. That thought process can imagine a better thought process, which you can then set into neurons. This thought process can also be refined, ad infinitum.

The interesting thing is that you probably cannot imagine what you will be a few steps from now. And that is how it should be. Do not waste your puny mind-stuff on it, for after only one change, your mind will be better.

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Is he a vous or a tu? You decide!

One thing that a lot of people have trouble with when learning French is deciding when to say tu and vous. Vous, though technically the second person plural, is also used as the second person singular in a formal context.

Let me explain that again: if you are talking to your friend, you call her tu. If you are talking to an old lady that you just met, you call her vous. You use the formal with strangers or people you must respect. This is the case with many romance languages. A similar system exists in Spanish and Italian.

While it is not as complex as, say, the Japanese conjugations to indicate relative social status, to us anglophones, the French grammatical formality can be pretty hard. In English, we don’t even distinguish between second person singular and plural. We just say you. In French class, you’ll hear stern warnings about using vous at the appropriate times, lest you offend someone. The warnings are usually accompanied by a half-baked set of ambiguous rules about when to use it. And then the students complain again about how difficult French is.

But it’s actually very simple. It is similar to something all anglophones do already. Seriously. Forget all of the rules that you learned from your French book and just trust your own internal sense: if you’re on a first-name basis with someone, you can tu them. If you’re on a last-name basis (that is, Monsieur Dupont or Madame Bredotot), use vous.

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According to Buddhism, desire causes suffering. Desire is any longing for things to be different from how they are. If you have a day’s work ahead of you, and you desire the day to be shorter, you want the impossible. It is that desire that will actually make your day full of suffering.

So what should you do? Accept the desire. Accept that you will keep on wanting and wanting and of course suffering. Accept that the day can’t be any shorter. Accept that the work will be long and difficult. Then get on with it. The secret is that by accepting the suffering, the suffering transforms into pain or boredom or any number of completely bearable things.

Meditation helps you accept reality. It helps you become more realist. It helps you get on with the difficult tasks ahead in an intelligent and elegant way.

In short, meditation is realism in practice.

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I’ve written before about how I believe that love trumps morality. That is to say that morality is more base than love. Morality as a set of rules to follow, a set of edicts laid out by society, is something to be transcended. And love–specifically due understanding and attention–is that transcendence.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: attention is love. Maybe this is just Stranger in a Strange Land talking, but if you truly understand something, you’ll know how to treat it, how to handle it, and when it needs to be destroyed. To grok is to love.

When you’ve got love in your heart, love for the universe, for all existence, your every action is full of grace and divinity. Your hand becomes the hand of a god as it carries out its steady purpose. That purpose is love itself, which knows no rules. Death can be love. And so can a kiss.

Morality is obviously contextual. In one society, ethics dictate finding a peaceable agreement. In another, vengeful violence. We can debate which one is correct and find no answer in a postmodern world. What knows no context is love. **And you cannot

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It used to be that if you wanted some meat, you’d have to kill an animal. You saw the animal struggle to avoid the blade of the knife. You heard the screams of pain. You saw the blood gush out from the throat. Now, meat comes shrink-wrapped and labeled. All of the bad, the gruesome, the difficulty has been tucked away from sight.

Moral strength is the ability to live with regrettable consequences. I have to constantly remind myself that everything contains good and bad. You cannot have good without bad. One of the main functions of modernity has been to separate out the bad–to contain and hide it–so that people can enjoy the good without remorse.

For instance, our garbage is whisked away to landfills before it even begins to smell. You hardly have to think about it. The good you enjoy–all of the products you purchase–is separated from the bad–the putrescent waste the products are packed in.

Modernity has brought the convenience of separation to the masses. There are many examples in modern life. Take anything that has been touched by modernity, figure out the good and the bad, and look at what happens to the bad. It is usually hidden away or confined to some other group such as garbage men or butchers.

I believe that having to make the difficult decision of killing an animal for your own good, and any number of other good/bad tradeoffs, strengthened us morally. It is a principle of the universe, a conservation law, that what benefits one must hurt the other. We become soft by not having to make the decision to hurt others ourselves.

The modern abattoire, while giving us a convenience, also does us a disservice: we no longer feel the grit of life nor the struggle for survival that remind us of the tradeoff. We are morally weakened. For moral strength is the ability to make difficult decisions. The ability to do harm in order to gain. To kill in order to live. To live with the guilt of affluence while others go poor. To play god, you might say.

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It’s amazing how quickly we forget our purpose. The other day I had a very transformative yoga class. As those following the blog may know, I have been regularly attending yoga classes for the better part of a year. I’ve done yoga off and on for a little over ten years. My practice has changed a lot in all of that time.

In fact, it may have come full circle. I first started yoga with the idea of attaining altered states of perceptions and thus deeper insights into the nature of reality. Yoga was a way to fulfill my philosophical curiosities with direct experiences.

I distinctly remember the first class I took. I began once per week then quickly increased it to twice per week. I was quickly reaching my edge–the place where I was stretching and learning under conscious control. It was a great amazing feeling to be so in touch with my body that I felt like a jedi master in training.

I quit quite suddenly when I moved to Paris. As my classes receded into the past, normal, everyday tensions and pain retook the corporeal territory they had once occupied. My memory of yoga, then, became a nostalgia for a relaxed body. That was nine years ago, now.

Recently, as I restarted yoga, I reconquered that ground and regained a relaxed body and mind. But something had been lost in the skirmish. Asanas had become challenges to be vanquished and I sliced through them like cannon fodder. Yoga was nothing more than a very effective exercise system.

But the other day, in class, while going slowly and deliberately, I remembered, from somewhere deep in my body, what yoga meant for me.

Yoga is the conscious transformation of the self through the application of will.

Yoga is an alchemy made to turn the lead of the body into gold, to transmute dull thought-substance into brilliant material fit for an emperor, and to distill the essence of the soul into a pure elixir.

Asanas can be faced in a number of ways. We have a choice. An asana can be seen as a physical challenge to be overcome or it can be seen as an opportunity to transmute the body into something better. I cannot explain the difference, but their effects are as different as lead and gold.

When I face the asanas as a challenge, a class becomes a test of endurance. I ask myself “can I make it?” and “can I push myself?”. But when I explore the possibilities for transformation stored inside each asana, the questions I ask myself become much less drill sergeant and much more Dalai Lama. “How can this pose make me more accepting?”, “what can I do to further my development?”, “where am I stuck?”, “what in my life needs me right now?”.

I think my diversion was necessary and unavoidable. I needed to explore that detour to realize that physical challenge is indeed useful. Some things need to be done quickly and with strenuous effort. I’m glad I learned how to do that. It was unavoidable because I wasn’t ready to face teachers critiquing and adjusting my form. Pushing myself past my limits has let me achieve positions with a depth I couldn’t have reached before.

While achieving a position is important, it is only a step in a journey. If you’re focused on only that step, you might get there, but you’ll trip and wander off the trail. It is much more important to take each step in time, and make it the best step it can be. Each step then becomes practice to get better at stepping. Focus on each asana, each moment as an opportunity to live better and you will direct your own transformation.

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I’m happy to report that I still don’t snack. The changes I made to my mind are working.

Despite avoiding snacking, my diet has been slipping into disarray. Recently I’ve been going to parties and totally pigging out. The issue with parties is that I feel it is good to celebrate. It’s good to eat special foods on special occasions. You don’t eat cake every day. In fact, those special days should be very rare.

But what should be and what are rarely coincide. There have been a lot of parties of late. What to do? Beer flows freely. There’s always cake. And less obviously, there are lots of starchy, grain-based foods. My spare tire grows.

When things aren’t working out, I have to reexamine my objectives. My goal is to lean out a little bit more. I don’t want to go 100% healthy food. Like I said before, I want to celebrate. And I’ll be traveling and won’t have total control over my diet.

My main strategry is to reduce quantity and increase quality. I don’t believe that disciplined eating for me is possible in the long term. And it’s certainly not enjoyable. But there is something enjoyable about sacrificing short-term pleasure for long-term goals. If only I could remember those long-term goals when I’m enjoying myself.

A good way to build in an automatic reminder is to use the swish. I have performed a swish exercise similar to the one I used to stop snacking. I want to reinforce the truth about sugar: it’s a threat to my health as well as to my waistline. Here are the steps to the swish I performed:

1. Find an image that you usually see before eating sugar. I used the image of a cake.
2. Find an image that represents the poor health and fattening quality of sugar. I used a picture of me fat and grotesque.
3. Bring the first image to mind. Send it away from you (in your mind) quickly while bringing the second image very close to you. It myst be done very quickly.
4. Repeat step 3 five times.
5. Take a rest. Distract yourself for a few minutes.
6. Test the association by recalling the first image. If you immediately see the second image (or feel the feeling from the second image), you’re golden. Otherwise, repeat step 3 more times.
7. Optionally, do the same exercise for multiple first images (like ice cream, candy, or whatever is your weakness).

Let me know how this works for you. I’ll keep you updated about how it works for me.

Another thing I am testing is to congratulate myself every time I decide to turn down something for the sake of my health. I don’t do it to reinforce avoiding cake. It’s meant to reinforce consciously choosing what I eat.

Check you later!

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