Elements of a life philosophy 3 - "Empty and meaningless"

Sartre said “Life is empty and meaningless” and Landmark clarified that to “Life is empty and meaningless and its empty and meaningless that its empty and meaningless” 

One way to look at this is something like: 

You are a speck of a human being among billions of others , billions before, and billions after. And all this on planet Earth with the vastness of the Universe around us. Can you try to say our lives have meaning in the face of all this ?

If you’re very conscious of this insignificance all the time, you might freeze into inaction. Or surprisingly, you might find it very liberating and free yourself up to do whatever you want. 

Even if you don’t get into the cosmological analogies above, you can see the meaninglessness in other ways: we are all born, we go through whatever we go through and then die. That’s all that actually happens. Everything else is our attempt to make sense of this and give us courage to live in the face of the apparent pointlessness. Religion and morality are prime examples. 

Going further into this, all our opinions and judgements are ultimately invalid. We may respect someone, love somebody, dislike someone, hate someone. But if you look into it, all those judgements don’t have objectivity in them. There is always another opinion or judgement you can have that it equally valid. This is best illustrated by a practical example, I'll add one in when a good one comes to mind! In the meantime, you could just try it yourself taking some situation or person that you really feel negative about. Then see if there is a valid other way to view it. 
There is no way to have a truly ‘correct’ or ’objective’ opinion about something. 

I believe that the ‘Maya’ idea of Indian philosophy was trying to express the same idea.

“Empty and meaningless’ can be understood as a theory but to really impact how you live life, it has to be experienced. That experience can be pretty discomfiting - a feeling of the ground giving way under your feet. 

How does ‘empty and meaningless’ influence me? I have a tendency to make negative judgements about people and create elaborate justifications in my mind to support that. 

Having internalised ‘empty and meaningless’ I’m able to catch myself often in this process and drop it and accept that its just my judgement and its up to me to stand by the judgement or not irrespective of the justification.  

Also, I don’t get too much into ideology - all ideology is an intellectual exercise that can never capture the entirety of life. Use ideology as an aid to thinking, but realise that’s its temporary and provisional 

Elements of a Life Philosophy - 2 : The nature of mind and thinking

Second in a series of posts trying to write down my philosophy of life. First one here: http://despoki.blogspot.in/2016/08/lifes-experiences-leaves-their-mark-on.html 

Most Indian spiritual thinkers in one way or the other talk of this notion of being without thought. At the extreme you will see writing that says that enlightenment is the state of being without thought. 

Meditation, as I’ve understood and practised it, is a process of being able to separate myself from identifying with my thoughts and instead being able to observe them. And sometimes the mind quietens down enough so that it is more or less blank. When I have reached that state in meditation, I always feel good about it. Often - unexpected thoughts pop out during this period of thoughtlessness, thoughts that would not have otherwise come to me. Thoughtlessness seems to give the space for stuff that’s buried in some way, to surface. 

Being able to observe thoughts implies that there is an ‘I’ different from the thoughts. This feels like it is a huge deal, but I’ve not been able to make much progress in taking this understanding further. 

We always identify ourselves with what we think. But our mind is an unreliable instrument. When extreme events happen they leave their mark on the mind, which stops behaving rationally in that area. So really we cannot depend on the mind to guide us correctly in most important decisions. As an example - to have a difficult conversation with a colleague at work might be objectively very important to clear up some misunderstandings or to work more effectively. But the mind protests mightily and comes up with all sorts of reasons not to have that conversation. So how to know when to trust what the mind says and when not to? If you accept that the mind is not always to be trusted, it opens a whole can of worms. Landmark’s way out of this impasse is the idea of the spoken word or declaration. Once we declare that we are something (‘happy’, ‘smart’) or going to do something (‘2 crores in turnover’) then that’s the guiding light. Our actions have to be in consonance with the declaration, not the mood or the thought of the moment. 

J Krishnamurti talked about thought arising when it is needed, for example to solve an intellectual problem, and then ceasing. Whereas normally our brain is always thinking of some thing or other. This resonates well with a distinction that someone at Landmark once made between ‘thinking’ and ‘thoughting’. The process of thinking is an active one, when we call on the brain to apply itself to some issue or matter at hand. Like making a business strategy, or planning the day's work. ‘Thoughting’ is the default process where thoughts come of their own volition. This is passive thinking and usually unproductive. A lot of our internal dialogue of complaining about people and events, worrying about the future, feeling bad (or good) about the past falls into this category of ‘thoughting’. If we eliminate 'thoughting' that leaves a lot of time when we don't need to think, we are just doing or being


Notes:
Ramana Maharishi on thoughts: " All thoughts are inconsistent with realisation. The right thing to do is exclude thoughts of oneself and all other thoughts. Thought is one thing and realisation is quite another"

Organising life and work

 I offer my experiences with organising my stuff in the hope that it may be of some value to others: 

I think a basic idea with organising is to have life broken into lots of tasks and allocate time to each task. A kind of ideal state is when you don’t have to think about what to do next or what to do today; that’s all decided and you just have to go about doing what was planned. Of course, that means that you schedule time in for planning and scheduling. And it could take quite a bit of time, but its time well spent. All this may sound to many people like a mechanical and soulless existence. It did, to me too. But when you take on organising yourself and gain some mastery, life on this side feels a lot more fulfilling, peaceful and ordered. Its also key to getting a lot more done. 

Being good at this stuff is particularly important if you want to work on your own (like a freelancer) or you want to take some time off. In these sorts of situations you have to be very disciplined about structuring your time, as there is no outside order that is imposed on you, like when you work at a salaried job. 

The other fundamental thing about organising is to clarify for yourself what you want to achieve and in what time frame. This exercise is something that most of us are completely unfamiliar with and uncomfortable with, beyond some basic annual planning exercise at work. But it has enormous value. Can you think about where you want to be in different aspects of your life in 10 years ? 5 years ? A year ? Start with the longest timeframe that you can and then work backwards to set milestones for shorter timeframes. Keep these goals 'visible' to you in some way, like pasting them up especially the longer-term ones. Its very easy to forget about longer-term things when caught up in the demands of daily life. 

Most of the time, I work with a spreadsheet for organising myself. I try to to capture everything about my life that matters to me on that sheet. It has worksheets like “Dashboard”, “Health” , “Finances” , “Personal”, “Special Projects” 

My basic unit of work is a to-do item and I maintain lots of to-do lists

Its important to get to-do's out of your head and on the spreadsheet (or whatever you use to plan). When tasks are in your head, they take your attention away from what you should be giving your attention to. By putting them on your spreadsheet (and developing a habit of scheduling them and doing them) you get them quickly out of your head.

When you have a fast-moving to-do list, like stuff that needs to get done at work this week, I find it motivating to mark off those things that are done in green or keep track of them by what percentage is still to be done so I get a feeling of making progress. 

One particular kind of to-do that is useful is what I whimsically call “Small small things”. These are (as the name suggests) small tasks (like filling out an expense report, or buying something ) that are not difficult to do but that may be irksome or that you tend to put off. You could set up a routine of blocking off time on your calendar each day to attend to these. Occasionally, set a whole day aside for these. 

A very nice tool is the Momentum extension for the Chrome browser. You can download it here, its free. I use it atleast some of the time, and whenever I do, it always pays off. The key thing it has is a question “What is your main focus for the day?” and an answer that you write down and that you see everytime you open a new browser window or tab. Wonderful for clarifying your own priority for the day and sticking to it. 

Finally, one  requirement for success in organising is beyond any ideas and tools like the above. Its the ability to follow through and do painful tasks that need to be done. You can plan and schedule all you want, but when the time comes you need to have the discipline to do whatever needs to be be done and what you scheduled. If you procrastinate or avoid, some key things will not get done and your success is at risk. 

If you’re by nature a unsystematic person and find the above far too difficult to do but you want to do it, Landmark’s Self Expression and Leadership Programme is a powerful way to practise and gain the discipline of organising

Do leave a comment if you found any of the above useful to you, or add your own organising tips 

Afternotes:

The above is what I aspire to, its not what I always or fully do. The next level of mastery is always out there..

Deepak Menon (https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepak-menon-0468045) says he finds a combination of Trello and Google Calendar very effective. Hopefully a guest post from him on this soon

On (Not) Living in the past

Life’s experiences leaves their mark on us. Most of the time we think of this as positive - learning from life. But experiences also distort our thinking. Someone who has been through severe poverty may go through life always insecure even if rationally they have made enough to feel secure. Someone whose parents have had a difficult marriage or who comes from a broken household will likely carry that over to their own marriage. They have no other experience on which to base their behaviour in marriage. 

This holds true at a societal level too. Certain ideas have strong hold on the national imagination and it is difficult for people to think rationally about this. Examples include the Kashmir issue in India and the Israel-Palestine conflict. 

One of the most valuable services that a human can provide another is to free them from this grip of the past, to help them to drop their 'baggage'. To quote from Landmark, to be “informed by the past, but not limited by it”.  To help a person to design their future, outside of the constraints of the past. However, the requirement for such a service is not even widely recognised today, leave alone provided. 

On a national level, I see an impact from this, for poverty alleviation and national progress, economically and otherwise. In particular, moving people out of poverty can be quite challenging because of the mindset changes required of the poor.  If societies as a whole could provide  service, it stands to reason that, freed from the ‘demons’ on the past, individuals and therefore societies will progress much more rapidly and in a  win-win way, than they could otherwise.