Meditations

Who has time to meditate? We have to spend all of our time thinking about things on purpose. There are so many problems that have to be solved very day that it takes all of our time thinking about those just to make the day work. Who has time to meditate? Professors, Ministers, Unemployed, Karate dudes, Monks, Hari Krishnas.

Free writing is meditation that is forces. It is forced like squeezing frosting out of a tube onto a cake. Those ideas have to choice but to come out. No wandering mists of thought stay on topic, push, push, push.

Meditation cannot be just free flow of thought. That leads to a meaningless sequence of barely connected ideas. It has to be more focused. Meditate on purpose. Focus mind, push thought, look for meaning. Is meditation a search for the meaning of something? We do not call it meditation when we are trying to solve a problem … that is thinking. We call it meditation when we are allowing our minds to search the cosmos of our brains for a solution that might be there is we just stay on topic for long enough. Medication should lead to broader solutions and ideas than just plain thinking. The image is that you open-up and search a topic across all references in your brain. You let the connections take you. But you still limit the flow to topics that are relevant.

I think sleeping is the next step down in uncontrolled thought. In sleep our minds follow paths of thoughts on their own. It is curious to what degree the conscious or controlling mind actually direct dreams. Is it really pure freewheeling thoughts? Or are dreams governed by our minds and morals as well?

Meditations … deep thought with XXX (Saturday Night Live). We perceive that meditation leads to deep understanding and wisdom. That is the right word … wisdom. Only by thinking beyond daily problem solving can we actually achieve wisdom about a subject. Daily problems get us to bathe, eat, sleep, and work. But, how wise is the average person who is dominated by this type of thought? Perhaps we must meditate so that we can move beyond the best way to clean the floor and understand why the floor should be clean at all. Or why my life has to be focused on clean floors. If I meditate will I understand what the important parts of life are? Will I be different from my floor-cleaning neighbors? How about my workaholic coworkers? If meditation leads to wisdom, what will you do with that wisdom? Is there a place in the world for wisdom? I think wisdom is not a very marketable commodity. Wisdom will lead someone to realize that the market is stupid; it is created and directed for the floor-cleaning people. Wisdom should allow you to escape the tyranny of the pursuit of money and pursue what is more important. Graduate students are supposed to be most interested in knowledge. But what if meditation tells me that gardening is #1, or raising chickens? From the outside the wisdom produced by meditating may appear worse than the cleaning of floors. If more people spent time in meditation seeking deeper understanding, then there should be more people that are unique and pursuing what they have learned themselves, rather than what the Gatorade of Mr. Clean commercials told them to do.