What are you running from?
By: David Robertson
Tags: Mindful, Meditation, Thinking, Consciousness, Mindfulness

I have a question for you. How often do you reflect on your life, passions and mistakes? How often are you aware of your biases, preconceptions and the torrent of deeper narratives that influence your rationale?

When I first started meditating it was a complete pain in the ass. Literally.

I sat with my hands in the lotus position and attempted to be still for about 2:30 before I ended up becoming more and more irritable. This went on for years until I noticed that the whole point was to sit there and FEEL.

We may sit there feeling alone but I can promise you, you are far, far, far from alone. Your mind is the housing that contains myriad realities that you are totally unaware of.

Don’t believe me? Well, what DO you believe? I’m not talking about what your in-group bias tells you to regurgitate. I am talking about the ability to make your own mind up, from beginning to end. Where are your logical fallacies?

Where are you inclined to be reactive regarding the beliefs of others? Look there, in there is the truth and it is painful. It is painful because very few people are capable of rationalising a set of thoughts. We seem to lose control of our faculties in the face of our emotions.

Much of our fast food culture perpetuates this problem by criticising those of us who think for ourselves.

Even if we adopt the notion that evolution is the best explanation for the development of our cognitive landscape, much of the religious and scientific doctrine we consume to understand it cannot come close to describing its complexity.

Most of us don’t even know what we believe because we have never questioned it. We cannot even stand to think about it. We run from it.

We run from ourselves.

One would think that the true nature of our minds could not be rooted in mundane oversimplifications but they are, everyday.

We need to go deeper than that.

Here we are standing on the edge of all experiences. Nothing is promised and nothing lasts forever, except this. These moments. Even ‘they’ have defied any scientific dogma. They are all around us.

Everything you see around you was first conceptualised in the mind of a person.

All inter-generational experiences have led us to this point in the fabric of reality.

Why do you ignore it?

Right now, in the experience of reading the text on your screen, the world is changing. Think objectively for a second about where you are, how much is going on around you? Go deeper, the physiological, the microscopic, the quantum? How deep can you go?

I am sitting in a Coffee shop. There are people all around me doing a variety of things. I am in a building, on a continent that is spinning on a globe suspended in space time.

We are on a spectrum of reality that very few people appreciate.

Why doesn’t that absolutely blow your fucking mind!? When you sit to be still.

Appreciate THAT.

Why aren’t you totally spacing out at the odds of your existence? Why do you treat it like the commercial soap opera your life has become?

Do you really want your whole life to be an episode of Friends? When you were given this gift?

In a second you could choose to do something, anything, just MOVE to the beat of your own drum. Stop fretting, LIVE.

The cumulative experiences of millions of people lie behind you. In the succession of each individual in your inter-generational family tree… Did those people suffer so much so you can sit on the couch pretending that comfort is the only thing worth living for?

Each tragic event that shaped the world is a stain on our society. Your ancestors survived that.

Within that microcosm there is a whole world you are failing to see.

That is magic.

That is real.

What now?