Follow Up On Pointlessness.

I have had a request for more commentary on pointlessness, how wonderful.

"Can you comment on how pointlessness and "living in the moment" (appreciating those few blades of grass, or the moment when the water sheers off a clean plate) are related?"

Living in the moment is easy to describe but harder to do. Living in the moment simply means that all your attention is on this moment, and devoid of memory or planning. In practice what this means is turning off the "Self-talk" that goes on in almost everyone's mind nearly continually. Self-talk tends to be all about memories, plans for the future, worries about what might happen. There isn't very much self talk about looking at the tree, or feeling the sunshine (although often these can be used to deliberately start living in the moment). One of the issues with this is it is possible to not think, but not really be either. Western culture calls this "zoning out", and it is not thinking without appreciating.

I think the difficult part of this is turning off the "self-talk" rather than turning on the appreciating. As I have said before your consciousness fills the spaces that is left. If there is no talking, planning and so on your consciousness fills with perception. When you are using your whole mind to notice things, you naturally will appreciate them.

Turning off the self-talk requires practice. This is why spiritual practice is called spiritual practice rather than spiritual school, or spiritual learning. I can tell you the method of the zen masters in one or two sentences, but the results take time. Practicing is simply sitting comfortably with your back upright in a stable position that you can maintain, in a quiet place in front of a blank wall. Then with your eyes half-open, in a concentrated manner notice your breathing and nothing else. That's it. do that for fifteen to thirty minutes a day for six months and it will change your brain.

However, the practice of it can be extremely difficult. I have known people say they simply cannot do it. The absolute key is to remember that just like with the breaking of any new habit you will fail, and fail, and fail at first. As soon as you sit quietly your brain will fill with talk, then you will tell yourself you are doing it badly, then you will tell yourself to stop it, and so on. This is completely normal and you should expect it and forgive yourself for it. Just keep going back to your breathe (and don't try to change it, just notice it). If you do it enough it will work, and after a while you may have some astonishingly intense feelings, they don't really matter either.

But to answer the actual question on how pointlessness and living in the moment are related. You cannot live in the moment without pointlessness, and if you get to pointlessness you will automatically be living in the moment. Pointlessness does not mean inaction. The best all-time explanation that I have heard for zen is the feeling that you have when you hit a perfect golf shot. When you hit that perfect shot you aren't trying to hit it, you aren't thinking about what your body should do, you aren't thinking at all. Driving a car is also very good for this, you drive unconsciously, but you do very complicated things, making difficult decisions. When you get really good at pointlessness/living in the moment you can actually watch yourself driving a car.

Another, " Or, another recent pet topic of mine: how our current culture with its value of productivity and thus "multi-tasking" is eroding the individual's ability to focus on a single thing for an extended period."

I'm not sure if this is true. I do absolutely think that our modern culture multi-tasks, is very fast paced, and spends much less time on average on any particular activity in general. I think our patience for something that doesn't fully engage us has dramatically declined. But I'm not sure this directly means that the ability to focus on things for a long time has decreased. I think of all the amazing artists, musicians, scientists, thinkers, engineers who are producing the most amazing things as a result of months, years, decades of the most remarkable focus at the extreme edge of the human brain's capacity.

So, I think the human capacity, the ability is there. In fact I think it is probably there at a level as great as at any time. What I think is happening is that the available stimuli are so much more varied, so much more intense than previously. The amount of choice is so high, and the intensity of the choices are so high, that if something doesn't measure up to that it is dropped so quickly and something more intense is chosen instead. I think the ability to focus on something is still there, kids can play a single video game that is absolutely exhausting to the mind with its intensity for hours and hours, longer than I can, but the ability to focus on things with low levels of stimulation is going down. People choose more stimulation rather than less stimulation most of the time.

I think the consistent choosing of more stimulation rather than less stimulation leads to a problem. For a start, what do you do when there isn't much stimulation, like in wintry lakeside cabin? You get bored. The second problem is that, just like an addict needs more and more of the same drug (except hallucinogens) to get the same high as the body adjusts to the drug, people need more and more stimulation to get the same sensation. For the people who saw the first black and white silent film it was more exciting than for the people who saw the latest CGI generated, 3-D, science fiction film on a giant screen with vibrating seats and a booming quadrophonic sound system.

This is one of the reasons why practicing meditation is so useful. As explained in one of the books I read, you don't really know if your meditation was successful until later. If you did it well the difference between the quiet of meditation, the reduction in self-talk, gets you a baseline to which everything else compares. When comparing a stimulation of 10 to 8 it's not that exciting, when comparing 10 to 0 it is really amazing. Meditation also helps to train you to notice things, making non-obvious things more obvious.

So, this multi-tasking, constant stimulation effect is real. While writing this I had the tv on in the background (I just turned it off because I realized the irony) and really didn't notice it except to fill in any pauses. But the pauses inform the activity. I think the ability is still there for people to really focus, but this focus only comes when people really, really love what they are doing or when they deliberately decide to learn the skill. If you have ever seen teenagers skateboarding in the summer I think you would believe the focus is there. Endless failures, often painful, but they just go back to it over, and over, and over again for hour upon hour. Why? because they love it.

The most important thing is not to worry about any of this. The greatest failure you could have would be to worry yourself to being stressed over whether you are calm and serene enough.

If you don't cut the stress out of your life right now, it will ruin your kids forever and you'll die of a heart attack and your whole life will have been worthless!