Well, meditation is directly related to that. Because…

The goal of meditation is not meditation. Meaning, there has to be no agenda about meditation.

And yes, you heard me right.

Meditation is unlike anything else that we normally do everyday and all that we are taught to do. That is, most of our doing are about “getting from one place to the next”.

To meditate is to be completely here and now.

To be completely here and now is to be your whole being. And that involves your body, your mind, sensation from 5 senses, your surrounding, and ultimately, everything. This is the state of being, which we are all capable of, that meditation is simply a mean for us to practice it and eventually, be in such state of being without trying – doing without doing.

To fully immerse in the experience of meditation, you cannot be doing something specifically.

So in a way, we qualify meditation as a practice of doing nothing. And to do nothing, it is helpful to be able to conceive and re-discover you are doing something, and also you are doing something that you don’t realize you are doing.

Therefore, we are provided with guidelines and steps to meditate. But keep in mind, to meditate is not to meditate, that is, to follow steps and guidelines.

The easiest way to meditate, at first, is by sitting because in sitting, you are at least not doing something physically.

So then we move on to the mental part. It is irrefutable that modern people are addicted to thoughts. We find our logical minds so useful that we cannot stop using it. Therefore, we are to sit and simply observe our thoughts.

And we do not try to stop thinking in meditation. If we think, we let it happen and simply notice what we are thinking. Eventually it will go away. If we try to stop thinking, we just end up thinking about trying to stop thinking which is another thought.

Beyond the mental part, we have the body. While we can watch our thoughts, we can also watch our body. We can observe all the sensations at the various parts of body. Feel where the tension is. And do not try to relax because trying to relax is itself an effort that causes tension. Simply pay attention.

After awhile, we will notice the intermingling relationship between our mind and body. When we think different kinds of thoughts, we cause different kinds of sensations/tension in our body. So we pay attention to both, which including the reception of our 5 senses and our surrounding is all a part of “the whole experience.”

Of course there are other techniques, such as breathing, but that is an whole other topic. One tip is for us to re-learn belly breathing and that when we focus on breathing, it is impossible for us to be thinking at the same time. There.

To re-iterate, meditation is about none of the particulars described about meditation. Just that if it must be said, it is a practice of a state of being.

Learning to be here.

Not “another thing to do to achieve peace”. Or blah blah blah.

And you start by rediscovering your innate awareness and letting it be free — by paying attention. Pay attention to your mind. Pay attention to your body. Pay attention to your surroundings. Pay attention to things you cannot see. Pay attention to everything.

Thus the story of a master telling a student what’s the secret of practice of zen (meditation) is “Attention, attention, attention.”

Happiness is like water to us.

Yes, we need water. However…

If we try to grab and hold on to water, it simply flow out of the hand.

If we try to preserve a batch of water in container forever, it will become stale water — dirty and stinky.

If we retain all the water we drink in our body and never let out, our bladders will get bloated and eventually we will get sick.

If we drink way too much water, we will also get sick and may even die.

If we hoard water, it does almost no good as we can only drink so much at once.

If we poke, kick, and strike water to try to figure out what it exactly is, it only gets murkier.

So is water. So is happiness.

Know that sensation when you find when you are most thirsty.

Know the taste of water across the tongue.

Know the moment when water flows into the mouth and down into stomach and your thirst is fulfilled.

Know the non-sensation of drinking more water once you are fulfilled.

Know the feeling when you drink too much and you are bloated.

Finally, we always perceive peace, beauty and vitality in water that flows free.

Now if we try to control how water would flow… Well, I will let you finish your own thought now.

It’s all about productivity
It’s all about technological advances.
It’s all about the newest and greatest.
It’s all about moving forward, progress.

And also allow me to make a blunt statement, that in the name of progress, our successes become failures.

Maybe we ought to take a minute and stop to do nothing. More than the question of what and how to do, NOW. Perhaps it is time to consider what not to do. That it maybe a good idea to do nothing than do just anything.

So many of us, come out of the mothers’ womb and from that moment, we are to take off and start running, metaphorically. We say “Life is short”.

So therefore, we are to learn to eat, pee, poop, talk, walk, run, and then to get educated, to become successful, to contribute to community and the world… as fast as possible. Meanwhile we learn parents’ and elders’ ways of living philosophy, friends’ advice, society trend, marketing information and what not. Over the years, we accumulate more and more identities and expectations.

Ah, so many things to do and accomplish.
From birth, we ought to never stop.
No matter what, we just gotta keep doing.
ALWAYS.

And so that is how humans had been for past hundreds, if not the last one or two thousands years.

As a result, we are incapable of knowing when not to do something. Or rather, we suck at doing nothing.

We spellbind ourselves into the illusion that we must be doing something.

Despite all that. I find that in life, we only need to do a few things right in life to have a decent time. That much is definitely the truth.

But instead, because we must do something always, we do a lot of things that create messes and troubles and then we spend the rest of the time fixing them. Probably making more messes and troubles because we are not very good at doing nothing.

If we are able to do nothing, there are much less things for us to set right.

In a orchestra performance, each instrument is to wait until the exact moment to come in and out. In between, it is to be silent. Unable to do exactly that, the performance is ruined.

Doing the right thing in life is the same. Knowing in your bone who you are, what to do, and what to apply at the right moment. You simply do it. And you know exactly when to act because you are not busy doing something else.

Like a beast attacking its prey. Attack at the exact right moment means there is a meal. Any slight error means nothing to eat, perhaps for days.

However, the instance for us modern people is more so where let alone all the things we must do to succeed and accomplish, we also over-dose ourselves socially, mentally, and emotionally.

It is no wonder we all seem to end up with social, mental, emotional indigestion. Well, and likely physical indigestion too :P

When we cease to do nothing, we never get the chance to be with ourselves. We never learn to live with ourselves. We never come to understand ourselves. We never give our brain and body a chance to recuperate.

And most of us don’t even sleep enough.

The situation of the world and the state of affair amongst humans are self-spoken and evident enough that such living attitude is bringing us to the verge of going estranged That is, if you think we are not already estranged.

A derived question from this topic, but nonetheless as important, is that as good as us modern people are with thinking and so fascinated by it that we even think about thinking, when and how do we stop thinking?

Because, doing nothing includes the cessation of thinking.

Some of you may find this somewhat doom and gloom?

Well, quite the opposite, the only reason and it is pointed out, and the fact that somebody (because I am not alone to observe this) can point this out, means that something can be done about it, by each of us. If you choose to.

I loved it and gave it my own little tweaks to convey what I frequently try to convey here.

A hero is only an ordinary human who does the right thing consistently.

Non-truth is what changes through time.
Truth is the permanent basics of reality, realized by wisdom through generations.
(if you care enough to look)
(if you care enough to be wise)

All our “tricks” have been changing for thousands of years.
The old teachings stay as the cat is let out.
What we need to pay attention to,
is here, is now
our being and us applying them.

Heroes may not always win,
but they never lose.

Now, whether it’s that, or you simply want to make any change, or doing what you do better, or simply just being. The following should be relevant.

There is a big difference…

…from not knowing to knowing.
…from knowing to doing.
…from doing it once to doing it often.
…from doing it often to doing it all the time.

Furthermore, the degree to which you are completely “here” with the doing, or in other words, the degree of your sincereness in the moment will determine how well the result maybe.

Why am I cursing?

Because every time I go to one of these sites, I can see my CPUs (Core 2 T7200 2.0GHz) going from idle to 25% usage — meaning half of one CPU. Yes, I am a big geek with a CPU monitor on my desktop.

Even though modern machines have plenty of computing power to generate these effects without slowing down. But think about millions of people around the world visiting these websites, increasing CPU power consumption. What wastefulness! And they are not even pretty but distraction against the text I want to read. Let alone some people have the fake white snowflakes against white background?

Let alone the power we are already spending on lightings and shit.

Oh, what harmful nature of ignorance and unawareness, albeit unintended.

Ok, done with my rant for the day.

When we must be happy, we lose happiness in that we fail to continuously sustain ourselves in a happy state and suffer horribly.

When we must be rich, money loses its meaning — to be a useful tool in our life — because just about everything and all our doing become a mean to conserve, hoard, or gain money however possible… turning us into something not quite human.

When we must be successful, it’s guaranteed that you will get that empty feeling when you eventually get there.

We we must be “in a relationship”, the relationship itself loses its purity in that our attention and sincerity are no longer on the other person.

When we must donate and devote ourselves to others, charity and generosity almost seem hollow and artificial.

When we must live (as if we are not alive already), for as long as possible, we do everything and anything that squeeze the life out of ourselves and are therefore completely unhappy, unfulfilled, and miserable.

So, shall we still “must”?

**See When the Intention is Pure, the Action Follows for the idea of intention.

I am not saying they cannot turn a profit. I really don’t mind them making profits, even off from me. We all need to make a living after all because money buys us food, shelter, and all. But moderation is always the virtue and what they had done and are still trying to do is by no way reasonable.

What is a concrete example you may ask? Well, look here.

This is the result of a transaction through Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (oh what a long name) that I must use in order to deal with company’s restricted stocks. Instead of one reasonable transaction fee, we got Commissions, Other Fee, Transaction Fees, and Service Fee. And this is not including the Proceeds Delivery Fee of $25 if I had chosen to do a wire transfer to my own bank account. Instead, I choose to be patient to receive the proceeds by mail.

My question is, why all the fees? And commission with service fee on top? How much did they do for me? We all know all these are done electronically now. Sure, you need to pay people to maintain the systems, but instead of being sensible charging one single reasonable transaction fee, we have all these. And this is exactly what our financial industry, our banking system does. On top of interest, they charge all sorts of fee for all sorts of occasions and transactions, or just about any time money passes hands, to drive up profits unreasonably and forever.

But we all know perfectly well that nothing in this world can go up and grow forever.

This is exactly what has driven the market to the ground. In a nutshell, the banks and investment firms make billions off transaction fee for creating/underwriting CDOs ranging from 1-1.5%. So they went nuts to lend out mortgages, and then hype up the demand and price of CDOs backed by these [unreliable] mortgages (bubble) to sell and exchange a shit load of them so then they get those fee. In between, banks and companies add financial products such as credit swaps and insurance for these derivatives which result in even more profits through fee while providing them the illusions that they are protected from the CDOs’ risk… But finally they run out of people to lend mortgages, plus unreliable lenders start defaulting, plus themselves and others realizing this cannot go on forever and BAM. (I may not be fully accurate and politically correct with these terms but this is the gist of it.)

Until CEOs, bankers, and all these investing “experts” and “gurus” and “managers” learn to be reasonable and sensible, or be replaced by ones who are, we are in it for a turbulent ride where they will do anything and everything to hoard and extract money.

I say in this blog title that they extract values not simply because they hoard money. They extract values from society because:

• They are hoarding money beyond enough for themselves, meaning either they have little to no values or they are destroying them in process of hoarding.
• To hoard, they would make others not have enough money, and how much energy, time, and money can people afford to develop values when they are preoccupied about surviving.
• Eventually, they would have destroyed money, wealth, values, and lives for everyone including themselves.

And let’s be honest with ourselves, beyond a certain amount of money for food, shelter, other life necessities, and perhaps some indulgence, what more do you need money for?

These are things that will never be taught or promoted by mass media, social institutions because as of yet, our so-called economy is kept alive by irrational and excessive consumption. Enough and reasonable be damned. Intelligent populace aware of how everything works and are inter-connected be damned.