This tries to be both a humble meditation and a light-hearted provocation, an exercise of variations on the well-known Jedi code, which has five entries:
Our busy life is more complicated than that, plus we are not Jedi (at least I am not), so here you can find a code for those of us who are unable to harness the Force but still aspire to some balance. It is not something to be taken seriously, just a blithe game that, who knows, may be helpful as a profane mantra. It has twenty four entries, and we will get through them one by one, although, if you want to meditate with them, I recommend muttering them in pairs, since each pair is somewhat related. I will keep the Jedi-code style to make it sound more theatrical.
Of course there is anxiety in this world, but the Jedi code already plays this game of stylistically denying what is obviously present, and then offering a way out of (or above) it. My interpretation of anxiety, specifically the chronic type, not the acute, is that it is your own energy being unable to find the way out, to express itself, so that it decides, as a prisoner, to burn its cage and bite the bars until you are reduced to ashes and breadcrumbs. Anxiety as tied-up, gagged, strapped, corrupted action. Most doctors would never prescribe you anxiolytics if you were brave enough to make your energy jump and run instead of trying to reduce it from your couch, but they know most of us will insist on keeping our energy jailed, so those horrible pills are designed to sedate and slowly poison your prisoner self.
So, next time you feel anxious, try to get out and move your ass. Your body is meant to get exhausted almost every day. Your heart needs anything but a gentle life. The energy cannot be destructed, only transformed, and when you insist on keeping it in a cage, it transforms into a self-destructive monster. You don’t need pity or even sympathy. These condescending attitudes only make it worse in the long run. Doctors know this, but they will almost never tell us, because they know we are a bunch of lazy losers. In a real-world Matrix, Morpheus would offer you a blue pill and a red pair of running shoes. If you really want to fight your anxiety, just let it free and allow it to expand and develop following its nature. After all, your anxiety is your strong self, imprisoned by your indolent and self-sabotaging other-self.
Our mind feels more time derivatives than absolute values. In Newtonian terms, it appreciates more fluxions than fluents. But as usual, a Platonic sickness creeps in our minds, trying to corrupt ourselves with the virus of perfectionism. Another self sabotage: whatever effort that does not promise perfection is deemed as worthless to even try. That is how we decide to stay pure black, complaining that we cannot be full white. That is why we become 0’s obsessed with 1’s, like Boolean fools. Our stupid consolation is that nothingness is already perfect, so we’d rather keep this than get our hands dirty with an imperfect something.
The way out of this malaise is to forget about perfection and focus on improvement. In mathematical terms, to make a time derivative (fluxion) of your mindset. Improvement is the key, without extending your sight to the horizon, without to futilely trying to calibrate how far you are from infinity. Asymptotic perfectionism is a black rabbit hole. By contrast, relative progression is attainable and healthy. And what is more important: the mirage of perfection will halt you, whereas the pragmatism of improvement will keep you in motion.
Forget about the idea of yourself as a point immersed in an external world, because there is another world inside you that, although internal, it is as foreign as the universe around you. Think of yourself as a shell, or even better, a membrane, surrounded by the universal Cosmos and surrounding an internal emotional universe. Both are equally difficult to grasp. Your inner world is made of emotions, and there is no way your tiny and thin rational membrane is going to tame that. However, we can understand its nature and, somehow, practice aikido with ourselves, analysing our inner momentum and, instead of opposing it, taking advantage of it, or at least avoiding its impact.
We learned that the external universe is not static. On the contrary: the fabric of space-time is dynamic like a fluid. So is our inner universe. Emotion is after all, motion. When we feel something, it is easy to feel that we are that something, and interpret this statically. Instead, learn its dynamics. You will, on the one hand, acknowledge its immense power, and on the other hand, accept that there are no states, just fluidity. Now you feel like this, and tomorrow you will feel like that. So don’t marry your identity to your current feeling. Be a flexible membrane and resonate with the fluid motion of your inner (and outer) universe. Ironically, once you are able to adapt to its pulsations, you can learn how to detach from it, and even use it to your advantage.
Our mind loves rewards. So much, that the whole world is now a storefront of rewards given for free. And there is nothing more dangerous than receiving rewards without effort. Our circuitry is being corrupted by all these mind hacks. Every time we treat ourselves with a free reward, we become weaker. Our attention, motivation, patience and tenacity fades away. Rewards are not bad by themselves, only when they come without a great effort, but the external world is engineered in such a wicked way that you need a great effort to avoid effortless rewards. Let the only reward be the results of your effort, and the satisfaction of a completed task.
Crazily, the external world also contaminates your mind with an effort culture, where it seems that without effort you are basically nothing. On the one hand, your will is dissolved by free dopamine, but on the other, once you can’t do any effort, they will make you feel awful for that. Here, you need forgiveness. To yourself. In essence, forgive yourself for not doing the effort, but don’t reward you without doing it.
Being just membranes between two universes, each one a turmoil of cosmic proportions, we can easily become silly spectators of inward and outward narratives, like amoeba membranes. We are a two-sided eye with a very entertaining film playing non-stop on each side. That is how hard our shell needs to work its own thinking. In fact, the first step to overcome daydreaming (being absorbed in an eternal two-sided film), is to realise we are in that cinema theatre. It is good to acknowledge our spectator role and allow to observe ourselves as spectators, which is a meta-film in itself. While you dream, you (at least I) think that I am really living that story. Waking up from the dream is the first step. Convert your daydreaming into daywatching.
Once you know it was all a dream, and even if the films go on, enjoy your position as an aware spectator. Observe both the inner and outer cinematic universes. And observe yourself observing them. But then you need make space for your own thinking, despite the bilateral noise. Again, this is mental aikido. You cannot think against the cosmical inner and outer forces, so you will need to learn their dynamics to gently bend them for your benefit. Thinking is not about performing a third film in the middle of the other two, but trying to blend the two into a reasonably coherent harmony.
Focus is the result, not the process. The moment you try to focus, your focus is on the focus, on the process of trying it, and not on the thing you wanted to focus on. Focus cannot be an effort and every aspect of it that makes you rigid will simply bring you farther. So focus should not be allowed to be a verb. It is a goal to be achieved by other tricks.
Relaxation is the process to become focused. I know, this sound tricky, because in some sense, relaxing could suffer the same criticism as focusing. You cannot force yourself into relaxation. On the contrary, any effort seems counterproductive. But it is not the same as focusing, because we can accomplish relaxation from via negativa, that is, from forcing our stressors out of our minds. And not just by deep breathing (which is great), but with a fully fledged chemical wisdom. For example, don’t even dream of focusing without having had plenty of rest, and don’t even dream to rest well without having had exhausted your body. There is a complex (yet simple) chain of strategies that leads to relaxation. Breathing is just the last link of that chain. In summary: to focus, relax; to relax, bring balance to your chemistry and physiology. There is no breathing out of this.
Remember that we are membranes, and as such, we need to actively decide what gets through it. We have the choice of being a passive and porous layer that allows everything, both noise and signal, both quality and trash. And we have the choice to be an active membrane that scrutinises every bit of information that tries to penetrate our barrier. We are surrounded by potential input, but you decide what becomes actual input. You need to become a very strict firewall that blocks everything by default and only allow high-quality exceptions.
The alternative is an inner world contaminated by the external one. And this is way more dangerous than it seems at first sight, since the input you accept can have Trojan qualities, and once inside, install itself in your inner world, or even worse, in your membrane. That is a quick way of losing yourself and become the slave of external interests, and work for their benefit without even noticing. Become a police, sniff as a dog, block and destroy any attempt to be assaulted by external noise. Don’t worry about missing interesting things, which is a frequent mask used by manipulative attempts to enter.
Symmetrically, be an outwards firewall as well. And don’t forget that what seems your output could be the Trojan activity of agents installed within your shell. Identify these Trojans and get rid of them. Block every outgoing traffic by default and select very carefully what gets out.
Even if you manage to get rid of the Trojans, there is still the danger of producing undirected output. As a spherical membrane that you are, undirected output will just make you a Brownian particle, jiggling around with no net motion. Think where you want to go and direct your output accordingly.
Freezing is always present and it is a non-linear danger: the less you move, the more you freeze, and the more you move, the less you freeze. This means that, once you start freezing, moving becomes more difficult. If you don’t break the thin ice, it becomes thicker and more difficult to break. In no time, you become paralysed by it. This is more difficult to avoid than it seems, since staying at rest is important, but give yourself a very small extra rest and the danger begins to appear. One day you perform a strenuous training, so you deserve a day off. But then you decide to give yourself a second day off and the third day you will find a great difficulty to move because of the ice layer that has begun to form. The same happens with friendships: give enough time and ice will grow to the point where everything breaks except the ice.
The way out of it cannot, by any means, be gentle. Don’t fool yourself with a progressive, little-by-little, step-by-step rhetoric. When the ice becomes thick, you need to go volcanic, both with heat and mechanic explosion. Only violence can get you out of stagnation. So, try to rest the just amount, and if you get frozen, burst with fury to get in motion again.
Discipline is one of the most misleading concepts I know. To be disciplined, you need discipline, and if you don’t have it, you cannot act with it. It is quite a trap. Etymologically, it means “to teach a child”, which I think is a beautiful meaning, way more interesting that the current and common military/obeying interpretation, which is quite disgusting. Discipline is a beautiful thing, something we should teach all children, but before that, we should teach it to ourselves. The problem is, how?
My trick is to think discipline as momentum, and I mean physical (and classical) momentum: mass times velocity. When you are with zero momentum, inertia will work against you, resisting any attempt to move. But once you get in motion, inertia will work in your favour by resisting deceleration (it will also resist acquiring more momentum, of course). This is bad and good news. The bad news is that you cannot be disciplined, only stay disciplined. And, as we live in a world with plenty of friction, the moment you relax too much, you will lose all your momentum. However, our internal world is not an over-damped environment where friction dominates. This is the good news: no matter how you acquire your inertia, once acquired it will resist abandoning you. So instead of trying to learn how to be disciplined, or even worse, how to be motivated, just build momentum by any dirty trick that you are capable of. Stop the abstract theory that will only stop you. Ironically, the usual scheme “motivation —> discipline —> motion” actually works from right to left.
Once again, we deny the state in favour of the process, the fluent in favour of the fluxion. Wisdom is like perfection: the only wise thing you can say is that you are far from being wise. So stop such nonsense and do the only noble thing to do: learn. This is trickier than it seems, since learning is not an easy process. It takes time and effort. We usually think that such investment is only necessary in our childhood and perhaps until we get some degree. After that, most people think they are wiser than they actually are, and learning is a process that you see only very rarely, even in the academic world.
To learn, you need first to accept that you don’t know. Favouring a learning attitude implies, de facto, a breakdown of your ego. And this is again like discipline, because the less you know, the less you know how much you don’t know. It is not easy to escape from such non-linear traps. Only a humble attitude, even if it is blind, can take you out of it. But don’t fool yourself thinking that learning is easy. Far from it. Perhaps, acknowledging this is the first bit of wisdom. The second bit is even harder to swallow: whatever you learn is unlearned unless you maintain it. So beware of your net gain of wisdom, since it can easily be negative unless you really live with your ears and your books open all the time.
Tension accumulates with anxiety, perfectionism, emotional rigidity, corrupted reward systems, alienated daydreaming, chemical and physiological imbalances, non-operational firewalling, freezing, stagnation and ignorance. In short: when we as membranes become rigid, and thus fragile. In that case, muscles teach us a very useful and counter-intuitive lesson: stretch to release the tension. It is paradoxical, because stretching is literally producing more tension. In fact, there is a soft paradox and a hard paradox here. The soft one, not really a paradox, is that, when we say muscles are tense, we mean that they are contracted, so stretching them means to force them with the opposite sign. This makes sense, so no paradox here.
But there is a hard, and thus true paradox when inspecting the sign of the tension described before, because once again, we are calling tension to what, in fact, could be compression. Every elastic spring has a relaxed state and two non-rest attitudes, and stiffness appears at either side. So, when we say we are stressed, are we, as membranes, stretched or compressed? No doubt, we are compressed. The overwhelming pressure from the outer world clearly compresses our membrane and also compresses our inner world. I don’t know anyone who suffers from a stretched membrane due to a too expansive inner world. So, the solution to this problem is the same we apply with muscles: stretching. Which is a very hard and painful thing to do! And, unlike with muscles, it is not clear how to stretch our membrane. This entry in the code is just to set the stiffness sign right and to set a stretching mindset. To actually perform the stretching, we need to move forward in this code.
Of course there is suffering, but when suffering, think whether you are suffering for growth or decay. If the former, then move your focus away from pain and concentrate on the great benefit you are getting from it. It is actually an easy reappraisal, and the results are surprising. But for that you need to develop a kind of apparently masochistic mindset, in which others will think you seek suffering, when you only seek (and obtain) growth.
This is one of the less trivial points of this code, since suffering implies temporary destruction. It is hard to understand that our muscles and neurons are antifragile, that is, that they growth only under destructive stimuli. This is a behaviour that only living organisms exhibit, and it is quite subtle, since the result grows against the process. Also subtle is that it works only within some limits. Go beyond them and you will meet actual destruction in the form of injury, obsession, illness or simply death. But tune for the sweet spot and you will reap the fruits of your own antifragility, one of the most important things one can learn.
Just as quantity is key to get growth from destruction, order and timing are also essential. Once the destruction is done, you need to give yourself time to perform that growth. This is what resting means, after all: giving time to heal and over-heal (become stronger and smarter). Notice that first you need to measure the amount of destruction, then you need to measure the amount of rest time (to heal without allowing ice to start growing), and last, you need to respect the order of things.
The order is the following: first comes the effort, rest comes later. If you stage rest before the effort, rest is not actual rest, but decadence. Decadence means you are weakening, decaying, deteriorating, declining, degenerating. In short: wasting yourself. The same act, which is staying quiet, silent, giving yourself to pleasures and entertaining, can mean two extremely opposed things: absolute decadence or delightful enjoyment. The order matters.
Of course there is planning. Stealing again Star Wars wisdom (in this case from Clone Wars), we know that “a failure to plan is a plan to failure”. And it is worth mentioning that planning requires a lot of focus, energy and even planning! But let’s not fool ourselves: once the planning is done, it does not execute itself. On the contrary: only expect resistance to it, from within yourself and especially from the external world, which will seem to conspire against it.
Executing a plan requires not less violence than to execute a crime. If you are gentle, with a lot of what we could label as pseudo-flexibility, you will start adapting the plan when faced with the first difficulties (that will appear immediately, don’t even doubt it). But soon enough, the adaptation becomes compromise, and real choices are to be made. Moving items is not possible any more, and you need to delete them, to choose between them. The pressure from outside is just too phenomenal. So, unless you defend your plan with the same violence as the world tries to oppose it, the plan will never be executed. In conclusion, yes, make a plan, but once the plan is done, rapidly shift your focus to execution mode, and get ready for a very hard fight.
Perhaps you think, after the last item, that the trick for executing your planning is like the trick for discipline, that is, building momentum. We call “routine” to such concept, but I am sorry to tell you this is a utopian idea. Sure, if the world would be gentle, as maybe it was in the past, you could build execution momentum and call it routine. This is not attainable any more. In your own inner universe you can surely develop inertia, discipline, but the external world today is tremendously over-damped: friction is so high that molasses seem like stratospheric air by comparison.
That is why there is only one way to successfully push you plans in a constant way without becoming immediately overwhelmed: having lots of fun. Again, this is a reappraisal process, but a more difficult one, and depending on your luck, it may be almost impossible. But forget about achieving an execution without seeing yourself as playing a game and actually enjoying it.
Needing makes you attached to the thing you think you need. Yes, feeling you need something is different from actually needing it. You only truly need things like air, water and food. However, our brain makes us feels the impulse to get other things, like sex or love or other types of drugs. But you don’t really need any of that. Enjoy them if you can, but don’t label them as needs, and be aware you can easily fall into the trap of such pseudo-needs. Needy feelings make your mind cloudy and your spirit muddy. The membrane shakes turbulently with them.
Practice stillness, like water in a pond. It is the only way the mud will gently go back to the bottom, allowing the water to be clear again, so that we can see through it. Stillness does not necessarily mean static, especially when there is too much turbulence. First, you can practice with gentle oscillations. Then, you can move to stationary states. Seek stillness through subtraction, not by forcing a stiffness that will fracture you. Always consider the inertia, the energy in the turbulent flow. That energy will not be destructed, so if you try to stop it, you will be destructed. Such energy must be redirected, channelled and finally dissipated. Stillness is the final goal, even if it lasts five minutes. A minute of stillness is worth more than a year of noise.
The same way you need to regulate what you think you need, you need to take control of what you think you need to give. Pure giving is almost always a bad idea. Your resources are very limited, and the hunger for them of other people are limitless. So, if you present yourself to the world as an overly generous person, you will be taken advantage of. If you can give air, water or food, just do it without second thoughts. However, most of the times you will catch yourself giving other things, mostly your time. It is then that you need to think about it.
Sharing is a much superior concept than giving. By sharing, you can give and be given, and strengthen the bonds between you and others in a symbiotic way. Other ways, like parasitism or direct manipulation, make giving less convenient. Don’t buy cheap philosophies that depict pure giving as virtuous. If they don’t praise symbiotic relationships, suspect their message. And most importantly, be aware of giving your time. Your time is not air, water or food, so no one really needs it. Share it only in symbiotic, mutualistic ways.
I would mistrust cheap approaches to mindfulness that promote the here and the now without entering into the subtle details of space and time. The here also involves an increment of here, and the increment of an increment, and so on. In other words, the here alone is a really poor and incomplete approach to the current place we are. And even worse: I don’t think we can actually feel the here, and I have some doubts we can feel the increment of here either. I am quite sure we start feeling from the second derivative (acceleration) onwards. And these derivatives require not only the here, but also the neighbourhoods of it. In other words, some there, to the left, right, top, bottom, etc.
The here is nothing without other neighbouring heres. It is the flow of the here what matters, and there is an art that expresses this beautifully: dance. Dancing is being here in full derivative form. While dancing, we experience all orders of acceleration, and explore the heres and theres that together form space. The concept of here, alone, static, is so poor that it would paralyse me. Even the still water of our pond, when properly inspected, is a beautiful dance of molecules. If they were frozen in their heres, it would be ice, which is only translucent, giving a distorted form of clarity.
Inseparably from the last item, we need to address the now, and all things said there apply here as well. Music is the dance in time, the same way dance is music through space. You cannot dance without music and, trust me, you cannot conceive true music without dance. It is absurd trying to separate space and time, so we cannot separate the here and the now. But again, the now by itself means nothing. It is the flow of it, in higher derivatives, that we experience, and that involves the future and the past.
Motion is the concept that joins space and time together. Motion through space is what defines time, but time is what allows motion to happen. It is, therefore, motion the concept that a good mindfulness should embrace. And not in a noisy, but in an artful way. When you focus on the here and the now, don’t be so strict. Allow their neighbouring locations and moments to participate as well, and feel the music and the dance that space and time bring you.
There is so much harm in this world… Most of it unnecessarily inflicted. When we talk about the outer world turmoil, this is one of the most prominent contributors to it. Our membrane contemplates such horrors, and tries to look the other way to avoid infinite pain. It is not clear how to deal with a world like this. Most people seem to choose the way of indifference, which means participating in the infliction of pain while disconnecting their emotions from such process. This, in turn, is what perpetuates the horror, in a very painful and seemingly unstoppable snowball effect.
The alternative, looking directly at the eyes of our suffering Earth, can perfectly mean instantaneous self-destruction. Empathy, the capacity to feel the pain of others, can make a heart implode if open to receive the actual amount of pain that there is out there. We need to look to avoid (or minimise) our participation in the harm, and also to defend the victims and to raise our voice to the extent that it can be heard. However, we must not attach our emotions to the pain of the external world, since that would be instant death. If you are an empathic soul, the world needs you in a healthy state. Empathy, we must admit, is a multiplication of pain, and although in low doses is educational and even vital for our future survival, an overdose is lethal. Detachment is the hardest pill to swallow, but such pill is the only medicine to prevent our heart from shattering. And most importantly, beware of the dose: take two pills and you can become indifferent again.
Love is the central motive force of our inner universe. It can bring the best but also the worst feelings in our live. Love can also bring two or more inner universes together, with their membranes kissing one another. But the external universe does not seem to teem with love. When clear from air pollution, we can see that what the Cosmos is teeming with is light. Well, and other particles, but it is light what directly arrives to our eyes and what can directly interact with our inner world.
I wish love would permeate the whole external universe one day, but that feeling is not only naive: it is extremely dangerous. Before that, it is crucial that, first, light permeates our whole inner universes. Light without love can look dull to some people, but it is still serene, still and peaceful. Even beautiful. On the other hand, love without light is the worst thing I can imagine. So, with or without love, let light be our guide.
Inevitably, as this code gets closer to its conclusion, it is only natural that the Cosmos takes the stage, since we spend all days strongly feeling our emotions but rarely feeling the Universe that surrounds us and that zealously keeps all the answers to all our relevant questions. We ignore the meaning of our existence, and most importantly, ignore if there is any meaning. We are drifting and dancing in the dark, and no true meditation can forget that this is the most important perspective to keep.
Nature keeps all the secrets with the barrier of our ignorance. We have been able to uncover some of them, but the most important remain out there as high-hanging fruit, perhaps accessible to winged creatures only. When confronted with a problem that we want to solve, there are two attitudes to address it. One is to hammer the problem from all angles and directions until it is cracked, or to hit it until it is destroyed, or to climb it until it is overcome. This attitude has been proven useful, but it seems to me that the crack appears when there is an insight, a rare spark of depth that instantly sheds light on the problem, like an epiphany. Sure, the hammering seems necessary, but I suspect that the problem is solved through depth, not strength. A brilliant second can bring more insight than years of blind effort. And although that effort may be needed, I am sure it can be dramatically optimised through a higher form of meditation that manages to explore the ways of the depth.
Ultimately, the separation between the inner and the outer universes is a (useful) fiction. What I call “me” is just a fiction that, the more I explore, the less it means. Meditation should be a path to reconcile the two sides of the membrane, to finally realise that there is only one Cosmos, and even the membrane is nothing but a part of it. True: its spherical topology is relevant, since it separates the universe in two parts: one that may be infinite but external, and another that may be finite but fully enclosed by us, and thus susceptible to be owned. Life and inert matter are separated by membranes as well. It is no coincidence: the spherical topology allows a very small thing to stand as a mirror image of its outer counterpart, forming an asymmetric but also undeniably powerful duality. That is the topological origin of life and also the origin of the ego.
It is, then, hard to admit that we are but droplets with delusions of grandeur. In part, because there is room to justify some greatness. Inside each of these droplets there is a incredibly complex and beautiful organism, and inside each one of its billions of cells there is an astounding city of molecules that still escapes our understanding. In terms of beauty and complexity, there is really a balanced duality between our inner and outer worlds. However, Nature is all there is to be, and it includes these marvellous droplets. To think that there are two natures, that is the worst mistake. To think that we are not daughters of the external Cosmos: that is the delusion. So, allow the concept of Nature to permeate your whole being, and acknowledge her as your true mother. The existence of other droplets like you, your material composition and, most of all, your certain decay and death, should be more than a clue of your true lineage.
There is no anxiety: there is action.
There is no perfection: there is improvement.
There is no emotion: there is fluidity.
There is no reward: there is forgiveness.
There is no daydream: there is thinking.
There is no focusing: there is relaxation.
There is no input: there is selection.
There is no output: there is direction.
There is no stagnation: there is explosion.
There is no discipline: there is momentum.
There is no wisdom: there is learning.
There is no tension: there is stretching.
There is no suffering: there is growth.
There is no decadence: there is enjoyment.
There is no planning: there is execution.
There is no routine: there is playing.
There is no need: there is stillness.
There is no give: there is sharing.
There is no here: there is dance.
There is no now: there is music.
There is no indifference: there is detachment.
There is no love: there is light.
There is no barrier: there is depth.
There is no me: there is nature.