Justin Harnish's Blog, page 2
September 13, 2022
The Dream Scenes of Small Thoughts
The constant distraction of thought offers much to investigate… if, of course, you can recognize when you’ve been captured by thought. Upon further review, there is little to distinguish these distracting thoughts from the narratives you form in your mind while reading a novel. When meditating next time, dive into the thought that was so absorbing.
First, where was this vignette played out? Did it hide in the plain sight of the scene you are used to looking at or, like reading, did it exist somehow in between your eyes and your mind’s eye? Who were the characters? Did you see them clearly? Or hear them talk? Did they use your voice? Could you distinguish numerous voices? How?
What did this mental short film make you feel? Were you modeling the future, trying to plan? Did you recall an argument or poignant moment from your past? Did this planning or memory leave behind a motivating feeling?
Finally, how did the capture work? Were you mostly aware and present one moment and the next—nothing—or did you gradually slip? Was the thought somehow more impactful than what you were doing or was it drivel you somehow were attracted to anyway?
Of course, small and sub-cognitive thoughts are common to everyone, taking away their ability to capture our awareness takes practice and paradoxically a study of their nature. For me, the content of my small thoughts are most often unimportant, but their capture of my attention can be nearly complete and come without warning. They seem to (weirdly…) pull me down and to the right. In my mind’s eye, I have to pull up and out of a small thought and wonder how something so mundane could replace oneness-with-loving-awareness?
Practice is one answer. I’ve had a lot more time just being with what is—headless, boundless, ever-changing awareness. I still plan and model the future so I can get ahead at work and to improve my relationship with my dynamic partner, but my mind takes a mile for planning when I want to inch along aware of, but not limited by, cognition.
Next time, think about that mundane thought, not with judgement (another thought trap!), but with the interest and investigation of Sherlock Holmes, so you see it sneaking around next time, and can watch it unravel before it distracts you.
September 7, 2022
Enlightenment = Graciousness / (Grasping * Aversion)
There are some simple algorithms to living a good life, things that just make sense. “Do unto others, as you would have others do unto you,” is a good example. This is a clear moral compass for humanity. “Wanting what you have,” a deep appreciation for what sort of opportunities we have been granted from our fortunes, smarts, and abilities to work hard.
The “Ordinary, Illuminated” algorithm starts with an optimization of graciousness, similar to wanting what you have, but more profoundly, at a deeper, moment-by-moment appreciation of the ordinary. Making space for the luminescence of consciousness, no matter what is happening.
Grace with the present and with others is what we hope to optimize in our examined lives, but how we obtain it is also an important part of our algorithm. We will not attain true grace and the wisdom we seek without minimizing grasping and aversion. Grasping and aversion come naturally, but take us away from grace, and require practice in mindfulness to minimize. They are opposite sides of the same coin of suffering. Grasping is an active attempt to seek something positive, while aversion is pushing away something we do not want to deal with because it is too difficult or painful. We grasp for pleasures—a new car or new clothing or the neighbor’s house—and we are adverse to suffering—buying insurance or taking care of our health by getting on the elliptical.
If we appreciate the present, really gain the gems of being consciousness, being with what is, and not grasping for transitory pleasures or being adverse to impermanent suffering; we will find grace, in our lifetimes, many times over.
August 29, 2022
Proud of the Past Me
My dad recently sent me a photo of me from when I was ten years old. I had a bowl haircut and a smile, it looked like a school picture with a granular grey background. It’s been about 35 years since I took that picture. I was as mindless as any 10-year-old boy in the Rocky Mountain West of the 1980s, so I do not remember what it was like to be that youngster, but I am proud of him. That little guy read a lot (Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and even some Agatha Christie), was a good friend, and played outside with his 7-year-old brother from morning to night.
While that tike would hit puberty, be rejected, waste some youth, he would continue to read, try to be a good friend in a more complex social environment, and change from just play to a reverence of the outdoors and the conservation of earth. Eventually exposure to books of all varieties and the love of the people around me would lead me to alter the course of a young man who did-it-his-way-or-no-way to someone mindful of the gifts and luck he has had and a desire to pay it forward.
What’ll I think of the man that writes these lines 30 years hence? Will my practice of mindfulness synch with memory so my snippets of presence can be recapitulated so I remember what it is like to be me now?
Whatever is the case, I am convinced that the things I am proud of in the 10 year old boy are still on the list from the 75 year old me—that I read a lot, that I’m a good friend, and that I spend a lot of time enjoying the outdoors. In thirty years, I’ve likely only added one or two more items—to be mindful and appreciate experience in the moment and give of yourself to those less fortunate. Oh, and I should stretch, exercise, and lay off the sweets because that child inside ain’t getting any younger on the outside!
August 8, 2022
Overlapping Magisteria
Humans are always splitting, grouping, and distinguishing; so much so that the, “there are two kinds of people,” meme is a meta statement on this fact. Our brains work by dissecting—to understand parts—to reconstruct the whole. Of course, this is not necessarily how nature—or our experience of it—works.
One of the first places we run into this is when we try to investigate the link and usefulness of quantum field theory to what is called—to a rough approximation—the macroscopic world.
As everyone understands, quantum physics defies (or seems to defy) understanding. That a quantum particle can be a 0-dimensional point and a wave, its nature largely described probabilistically, and with little adherence to locality or communication speed limits, seems the beliefs of religious zealotry. Yet, most modern digital technology—from the logic and memory utilized in today’s semiconductors responsible for the operation of phones, computers, and the internet to global positioning and communication are thanks to the engineering of machines based in these theories.
It is as if the craziness of the quantum world communicates with us through the black mirror of our phones. There is truly little purchase between quantum and macro to be had elsewhere. We are told tables and things like them—solids in phase and experience—are anything but. More space than stuff. Our perceptions seem to be from a wholly different place than the fields that created them—it is as if we do not see reality at all.
Enter here Donald Hoffman and his team of cognitive scientists and physicists at the University of California—Irvine. Hoffman’s conjecture is that, for perception, fitness beats truth, that evolution has found that an algorithm based in the nature of reality—spacetime and quantum field theory—is of less use in the survival of our selfish genes than is a user interface that we create to perceive the fitness function of the object. A snake is more snakelike, an entangled quantum field less entangled or field-like in our GUI or graphical user interface, for that is what has helped us survive... that is what makes us human.
We have even agreed upon this GUI through its evolution as a feature in our system of fitness. Is there an “apple” on the “table” when no one is looking? No, the GUI is dependent on humans. Does the same “apple” appear when some independent human adult enters the kitchen? Yes! Where does the “apple” go when no one views it? Back to whatever it is in reality when not being manipulated by our GUI.
This shocking conclusion is another of nature’s overlapping magisteria that only “shock” us if we have been trained that human evolution is not multimodal and is not very integrated with the working of our brains and our minds. Instead, it is likely that our success depended on human animals evolving a unique sensory perceptive graphical user interface based not in reality but in the exact algorithm that was determining survival—that is, fitness to natural selection. If the delta between reality and fitness was great enough and this GUI evolved far enough back in time, our experience of the GUI would give us an advantage that we have exploited and was only recently uncovered by our advances in science and engineering.
If what we perceive, what we remember and plan, and all but what our most unintuitive scientific thought is a GUI created by our evolving brain, are we living in an illusion? Not exactly, there is still a reality driven by quantum physics and whatever a snake or an apple is in reality, these items are harmful or helpful, respectively to your fitness and recorded as such on the GUI. While an “apple” may taste more like Tasty Wheat, it still fulfills a positive fitness function.
Consciousness is both the firm ground of human experience and our shared relationship to one another as a species. Consciousness overlaps among us, our shared user interface evolving to create the vividness of what we need to survive and our feelings about it. This dynamic drove a desire for pleasure and the avoidance of unsatisfactory and restless outcomes. But now our modern world is developing tech from reality faster than our GUI and our shared conscious experience can evolve. Furthermore, the evolution we need is counterintuitive, one that is equanimous to both pleasure and pain due to their transitory nature and one that offers good intentions to other gene-carrying human organisms that may technically be in genetic competition with us. Our knowledge of our experiential evolution and the current limits of our GUI to make us happy and wise together—as a society—must be recognized if we are going to make improvements that ensure our bright and exponential future.
July 25, 2022
Line of Sight
Lay on your back and imagine your line of sight. First it moves above the rooftops and is backlit by your neighborhood and then the whole city. It is shortly at 10,000 meters, cruising altitude for a plane, looking down over rivers, mountains, farms, and fields. Next the gorgeous, living, glowing eggshell of the planet is behind you and your line of sight begins a voyage into space.
If we imagine a single line of sight, that of an instant, it has likely just the vacuum of space between it and the edge of the visible universe—space is mostly space, empty of matter-energy, whether light or dark.
Physically, there is little that you would “see” during your life (or even the life of the planet) if you tracked the light along any one line-of-sight; a hundred years, or even a few billion light years getting you nowhere near the artifacts of the cataclysm of the big bang…
But, your imagination and moreover, a scientifically-informed conjecture, will help you arrive quite comfortably alongside any of the signposts—supernova, galaxies, black holes, pulsars, and the like—on your way to destination at the edge of spacetime. What we know of the universe from careful observation and mathematics allows us to clearly recreate it in our mind’s eye.
Beyond the horizon of sound and sight, allow your imagination to interrogate existence, discovering the never before trod paths of interstellar space, and maybe… to map it onto a grander consciousness.
July 20, 2022
Meditation is a self-deprivation tank
The instructions are very simple and work: be with what is, drop all concepts, don’t grasp what’s pleasant, don’t push away what is unpleasant.
If you practice and continue to start again without judgement when distracted by thoughts or feelings, the selfless nature of experience becomes apparent. You are just being consciousness. Meditating-as-consciousness, meditating-as-loving-boundless-awareness is a self-deprivation tank!
Take this opportunity to point at your face. Actually do it.
Really look at your finger and let your concepts of subject and verb, finger and pointing, fade away. Can you distinguish what you are pointing at from where you are pointing from?
Let me repeat that—it is an easy activity in defining the non-dual or selfless or consciousness-forward state of existence: can you distinguish a difference between what you are pointing at (the apparent-subject) from where you are pointing from(apparent-object)? You cannot and neither can I. It is all just consciousness.
The self we make for ourselves, our avatar through life is not perceived, it is a self-referential thought—commonly used—like a toothbrush.
But our nature (that is with us in every moment), that of our boundless awareness, both has so much more utility and is the most awe-some thing in existence!
First, it has utility. As is covered elsewhere, consciousness is our source for:
relating to/making space for others the wellspring of good intentions (loving-kindness) for others our morality our care in the face of suffering our goodness in the benefit of society and posterity our service to others our benevolent democratic governance.As to awe, consciousness is beyond magnificent, it is the source of:
personal meaning in the appreciation of consciousness’ space, quiet, boundlessness, and uniqueness. a connection with existence in the only timeframe possible for us to be appreciative of reality, the here-and-now eternity, at least from consciousness’s side of experience. There is no unconscious void after death, just different identities within consciousness.All of that, is as clear as the pointer finger on your hand.
July 13, 2022
Being with what is
It is a simple yet profound instruction: just be with what is.
Before concept. Don’t label things. Don’t think, “that is a car sound.” Just be with the sound.
Just being is not grasping. Being is not trying to improve experience, it is just awareness.
Being with what is does not push away. If a thought crystalizes, be with that, not as a concept, but with whatever a thought is. Notice how the energy of awareness defrosts the crystallized thought.
Being with what is recognizes the labeling brain, prone to conceptualize. Notice how the labeling brain is silenced in the openness of just being experience.
Naturally as you open to a greater intimacy with what is, you will recognize that you are being what is. You are not with it, but identical to this boundless loving awareness.
Oneness
Today, I sit like many of you, in anticipation of the release of more images from the James Webb Space Telescope. A marvel of engineering and science capable of expanding our view to the light of the earliest universe and habitable worlds. In this vast and extraordinary cosmos, it is easy to find difference, to see the alien nature of what is “out there.” We feel like we look out from the eyepiece of this beautiful telescope… instead we are looking also within.
We are not distinct from the universe. Our experience is of a piece with it, a unique viewport coupled with the smells, sounds, sensations, and our unique thoughts of being it—of being this universe of experience we call consciousness. Not a separate self and a cosmos, but non-dual loving awareness.
Our existence, even in the most materialistic rendering of reality, is one with the processes of the universe. We are made of starstuff to be sure, nearly eternal in our mass and matter. Our existence, like all of the rich material structures of space, the stars, galaxies, and nebula, plays out in the ancient ruts formed in the first minutes of the universe by quantum fluctuations; places in spacetime where complexity could find temporary respite from the entropic, thermal equilibrium of spreading out.
And for now, complexity reigns in those places where we point the James Web Space Telescope. As the bits flipped and ran random instructions, a new process to counter entropy was programmed into these ruts in the early universe, selection, a way in which the universe could program the complexity into viable engines of greater entropy like galaxies, stars, planets, brains, and consciousness.
The fundamental layer of reality is not known. It is as likely bits as it, programmable quantum distinctions with basic subroutines like selection running in areas of high complexity, including in consciousness. The insufficiencies of separating ourselves from the complex, dynamic programming that we are one with, that makes the fundamental fabric of reality, are being revealed to the selection pressures core to the processes of the universe… to be stripped away every time we see ourselves in the cosmos.
Go Webb!
July 11, 2022
Strategic Settling
Grasping in a world of change causes unease, unsatisfactoriness, dissatisfaction, and suffering. These are the insights of the Buddha. They seem antithetical to life in the modern world where we have to strive and connive to survive. We are always trying to protect what we earn, and to a certain extent, we want to work at something that pushes and pulls us to be a little better, more innovative, more competitive, so we desire just a bit more.
But do we ever stop and appreciate where we are and how the things we have actually grasped make us feel? Even for the best things you have attained—like financial security, college for your children, or retirement—do we take pause and really enjoy them or do they have the same valence as hygiene, just another of life’s necessities.
In the modern age, we must plan to settle, to be strategic about the end of grasping. Let’s start with your car or home, can you plan to stop grasping for something new or of higher value or status than your current one? Can you strategically settle for what you have and really appreciate it? Try it with your car, clothing, home, or anything else you grasp for—and plan on paradoxically being a bit more satisfied in your life.
June 29, 2022
Loving Awareness
Ram Dass would call his honed conscious state loving awareness, which always struck me as the most colorful way to describe our ordinary illuminated state of being experience.
But one day recently in the middle of practice, I decided to take it as an instruction, as in, “try loving awareness on each in breath,” or “orient your mind so that it is loving awareness in the present moment.”
Try it. Try loving consciousness. Make a friend of your mind. It is after all your constant companion throughout your life, the only thing you can be certain of.
I was transfixed for a time with this new attitude in my practice. The people close to me get a great deal of my love and I tell them every time they are near me or any time we talk—I love you. I practice loving-kindness or metta meditation and try to imagine compassion in relation to suffering and sympathetic joy in relation to happiness for experiences in my life, in the lives of my family, friends, and even in the lives of strangers. I have loved experiences, cognitive pursuits, music, books, foods, and even my meditation practice itself, so the most sensical thing is to turn love on the space where love is an articulation of the boundless loving awareness… and begin loving consciousness!
But this of course is not quite right—there is not the lover (me) and the beloved (awareness), there is just loving awareness.
Take on the aspect of love. Try to embody it in your practice. Really hone in on the feeling of what it means to love the present moment, life’s sole contact with existence—what is. You are loving awareness, a formless entity of love. Sharing an intimacy with reality beyond what is just on offer in the purely physical sense. Being loving awareness.
Glow as loving awareness in your daily life—making space for the suffering and joy of others—and appreciating life and loving consciousness in all of its illuminated splendor.
