Moments after I surreptitiously took this photo, this young fellow, Riley, took off his VR headset, looked at me, and said, “I downloaded all these movies for this plane but there is no wi-fi so I can’t play them. Never mind. It was only artificial happiness anyway.”
I asked him about this futuristic portable VR gadget as last time I checked you needed a whole computer for VR. Not any more – in this latest model the tiny computer is in the headset itself. “Wow, everyone will be getting one of these soon!” said I. Riley laughed, “They already have one!”
I offered that it was just as well he wasn’t going to spend the next 8 hours in a totally hallucinatory universe, plus we had the sun setting on one side of this plane and the moon rising on the other, which was kind of cool, you had to admit. He agreed: “Besides, these VR gadgets suck the dopamine out of you, so I’d prefer not to spend too long on it anyway.” We agreed that real happiness comes from a peaceful mind.
I realized this was a particularly present and charming 18-year-old, who could actually hold eye contact and a conversation, lol, so we got chatting. Turned out his Dad is a Tibetan Buddhist who has been meditating for a few hours a day for decades. That explained a lot. Riley also had very long red hair, which may or may not explain a lot as well.
Riley asked me about meditation as he intends to get around to it more at some point (although “it’s hard to focus”) ‘cos he knows that’s where it’s at, thanks to his Dad. He, like almost all of his friends, suffers from some anxiety + catastrophizing thoughts, and ADD medication is the order of the day; so we chatted about ways to alleviate that. At one point, he said, “I bet you’ve never given a teaching in this exact spot before!”
It was good to meet him, an encouraging ambassador for Gen Z; though he did say that it was going to take a tremendous amount of willpower for him and his friends not to get sucked into this alternate 3D world. They have more odds stacked against them in that department than did previous generations, yet they also have arguably more access to the effective solution of meditation, which was practically unheard of when I was 18. I have noticed a big uptick in people saying they now meditate – including a few interviewees in my Dad’s Sunday Times magazine yesterday, and my own sister-in-law – something I would not have seen coming even five or ten years ago.
Which brings me to the second installment of this article: Our attention is fracked.
Time out
As mentioned, the first step to getting our lives back is to take actual time out, even ten minutes, which we can do with breathing meditation and/or meditation on the absorption of cessation of gross conceptual thoughts, aka turning the mind to wood, as outlined here. Talking of which, here are a few other tips to help us with this meditation.
We just disengage: We can’t actually stop thinking, but we can disengage. Thoughts may be flitting through our mind but we are not following them because we are a piece of wood or a rock, and inanimate objects cannot think. We’re totally relaxed – a relaxed rock, by the way, not a rigid one.
We abide in space/absence: After doing this for a few minutes, where before our mind was full of thoughts, there is now a bit of a space, a cessation or absence, and we just want to abide there. Ah, peace. Our gross distractions have dissolved into a deeper level of mind like water bubbles dissolving back into the water from whence they arose. We give ourselves some time to rest there, there’s no hurry to get up.
Our mind is a bit subtler: Because our gross dualistic, aka chunky, thinking is settling, our mind will become a little subtler. It’s a bit like treading water in the pool, and then you stop treading water and sink, but in a good way. What happens is that our consciousness just naturally begins to absorb in the direction of a more subtle mind, in the direction of our heart. We allow our mind to become a little bit more still, a little bit more absorbed, and, as we’ll see, a little bit more peaceful. And it feels good so we’re in no rush now to end this meditation and do something else.
Portal to inner peace: We can use this to enter a portal, we might say, to the inner luminosity, pristine clarity, and natural purity of our awareness. There is infinitely more space inside us than outside, which is really saying something if you’ve seen a Webb telescope image lately. We are connecting to the peaceful pure nature of our mind, to its potential, and to the refuge of blessings. We can identify ourselves with this: “I am a peaceful person with limitless potential.” If we allow ourselves to feel this, it will automatically motivate us to become even more peaceful and to do something that will actualize that potential. So now we are being very proactive with our lives. We may even find that we have less craving for all that entertainment with which we distract ourselves from our own greatness and happiness.
Far from escaping, this meditation is putting us in touch with reality versus the fevered imaginings of our daily delusions. “I need to go on a proper holiday”, the lovely lady at this café just said to a customer, “not just escaping.”
Kids these days
I was talking in the last article about these educators’ concern for the destruction of attention spans. We are undergoing “the great rewiring” of young brains, some people say. One thing Riley believes quite strongly is that people under 16 should not be given gadgets AT ALL. My 22-year-old nephew came to stay with me last week and I was faintly amused by his saying that “children today” are apparently “more dim” than they used to be due to their overuse of gadgets. I guess every generation looks down on the generation(s) below, and I am now at quite a great height.
We keep seeking enjoyment and happiness outside of ourselves with our phones, etc – this is our culture these days. But one of the major drawbacks, other than it doesn’t work, is that we are wasting all this time that could be spent finding the real happiness we seek. It’s meaningless, and we need meaning in our lives.
With concentration and mindfulness we can stay focused on one thing for as long as we want. For example, we can develop some warm affection for someone, eg, a pet dog, which is a happy state of mind, and are then able to stay with this, eventually for as long as we want, and even expand it. Even if we only stay with it for only 2 or 3 minutes, this has a very healing effect on the mind. We become calm and contented. We discover some joy and bliss from within. These are generally not the feelings we get off our phone, are they? Happiness comes from inner peace which comes from concentration. Without the ability to focus, therefore, we may have moments of excitement or exhilaration, but they are quickly replaced by boredom or dissatisfaction, in a vicious cycle.
Break the cycle
We can break this cycle with this meditation on turning the mind to wood. And one thing this meditation shows us is that we don’t have to take our thoughts so seriously. In meditation, we can rest the mind in its boundless expanse. Once we arise from meditation and go about our day, bubbles or waves will keep coming up from our ocean-like mind, thoughts and their appearances will reappear. That’s just life, we can’t stop these. Plus we need them in order to function and communicate in the everyday world. However, we can remember that our wave-like thoughts, however large if caught up in them, are in fact tiny movements or ripples in the vastness of the ocean. We can learn to let these be. We can learn to let these pass. An ocean can accommodate any number of ripples. Our mind is so much vaster than the size and the shape of our worries.
With this perspective, we don’t have the same need to fixate on our thoughts and their supposed narratives. We can loosen up those rigid judgments of ourself and others, all those pointless stories. We see what is arising in our mind as fleeting and empty. Our frame of reference grows. As Venerable Geshe-la teaches, and to use another analogy, just as there is room in the sky for a thunderstorm, so there is room in the mind for our delusions. Even our most thunderous thoughts cannot destroy our vast sky-like mind.
Although the mind is always free, it remains imprisoned in constraints of its own making. However, we are literally never separated from our unbounded root mind – it can be healing just to know this. This meditation is the beginning of the way out.
Thank you for reading.
1 Comment
Hmmm? The parent of one of the supposed Lost Generation, commonly referred to as GenX, and the member of the support staff at a local elementary school district.
Harry Chaplin, in Cats in The Cradle, reminds us, “…as he grew, he said I’m going to be like you Dad, you know I’m going to be like you.”
Though unconvinced in the beginning, he later acknowledges, “And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me He’d grown up just like me, my boy was just like me.”
The son rides bicycles really long distance, as a sort of yoga, to balance the complexities of his modern day existence, brought on no doubt by Game Boy and Mario Brothers years ago.