One Step Towards Slipping the Shackles

A first skill of meditation is observing the arising and passing of thoughts. Another skill is to actively let go of thought processes: we notice ourselves thinking; we return to the focus of the meditation method (typically the breath and/or bodily posture). Recognizing and disengaging thought and internal narratives becomes a familiar, regular reaction—we soon notice our minds gnawing on habitual thoughts throughout each day.

The mind increasingly fosters a sense of "mental space" through regular practice. An expanded, more lucid awareness regularly developed gets more space and time to perceive phenomena and make decisions in response. The mind will sense in advance when certain types of thoughts and mental processes are stirring. This upcoming “mind queue” is experienced and discerned even more clearly as a quality of deep developed concentration states.

One thought process that is good to recognize—and dispel—is comparison of oneself to others—and alternatively comparing oneself to a past or imagined future version of oneself. These are not helpful thoughts in any practical way. But also—they are miserable to think about! They’re stirred up by all sorts of mundane and profound stresses or unresolved feelings buried a bit further down in the psyche. Conflicting, churning feelings about the personal health, wealth, and relationships of mine and thine—and all the while simmering in the background is a blurry awareness that the only guarantees in life are aging, illness, and death.

This is all very obvious stuff, it would seem. But who among us does not endlessly catch themselves yet again going over this same sort of patterned narrative drivel in their head? It’s quaint how predisposed all of us human creatures are to being shallow and petty. We can’t stop comparing privately and aloud the most superficial externalities: wealth, beauty, mental and physical health, career or status, privilege and luck. If you have aversion towards how “fake” these things are in your youth, you find out soon enough that there is no real escape in the world from vanities and the measurements of vanities. These are the tangible, allegedly verified, conventional distinguishers and meaning-signifiers of life’s quality in premium which we are socially and biologically evolved to consider.

Most particular it is indeed then that these mental fabrications—and the personal compulsion and collective determination to evaluate and compare ourselves by them to others—happen to make our human lives pretty miserable! This subject matter relentlessly bores its way into our empty personal narratives in perpetuity, gifting us with regular psychic damage major and minor—which has the added absurdity and irony of being dealt out to us most often by our very own mind. The roving oscillations of our human minds act like a double-end boxing bag we keep trying to make our business to train with. It keeps snapping back and whacking us in the nose.

Even though comparing ourselves to the particulars of another, or to an ideal past or future fantasy, is such a remarkable waste of time and dumb thing to do, we’re a sick species, and can’t help ourselves. We need an effective psychic self-defense! It seems that with proper meditation training, we can examine and pare down the true motivations and purposes driving such habitual thought-forms. All this even before confronting the broader, deeper issues in the psyche which enhance and motivate them to bubble up.

First, let’s recognize this: when comparing ourselves directly to others, we are obsessing over mundane and only externally visible (and even then only fractionally, partially) conditions resulting from innumerable unknown, uncontrolled factors and variables of life. Might as well realize the mind completely, gain total omniscience and insight into all karma—because that’s what you need to understand all the conditions of another’s life in its entirety and how that relates to you, the protagonist.

But more important and foundational to meditation as a practice and skillset: when we compare ourselves to others directly, there tends to be something *questionable* motivating the very thought process. This particular pattern of thinking will always subtly or overtly make a person miserable, but also does not bring any solutions to the dissatisfaction experienced before, during, and after. It does leave a person more stressed out and upset, or a bit more emotionally deluded. A process of becoming dumber.

What fiends are behind these thought processes, sabotaging our own very souls, tormenting us with our own mental fabrications? Why, it’s but the self in shadow—it’s myself when I do not (realize I do not) lucidly perceive my own mind!

A seemingly similar kind of thinking which can be to our benefit instead: thoughtfully cultivating a sphere of people with qualities which bring healthy peer influences. There is a difference between direct value-oriented comparisons to others and consciously giving some attention to the quality and substance of peer influences. Instead of thinking what specific details, statistics, or minutiae glimmer dimly in the lives of others or our own at other times, it’s better to pay attention to what general qualities, habits, and momentums of those in our life are perpetually engaged and subtly influencing us as well.

The qualities of the people you want around you is a whole different topic. Without idealizing healthy behavior for ourselves and others, we’d all optimally move through life like a sociopath or moist automaton accumulating a circle of friends/peers/colleagues/mentors with S-rank habits, values, and personal qualities, coldly dropping anyone with flaws or bad luck (so, like the entertainment industry). People are human beings, nobody is perfect, you can’t systematically organize a perfect portfolio of friends or romantic/sexual partners, you can’t successfully assort human beings with the approach of a neural network. That certainly never stopped or stops people from trying, though.

It’s not the stats or numbers or specific achievements of others which you ought to think about or match, it’s the habits and values and qualities you want to reinforce in yourself and maybe others that should be considered. Don’t compare yourself to me as someone who has “achieved” things, but instead keep my influence and correspondence as one of many in your energetic spirit investment asset portfolio.

A lot of people in recent years have taken up meditation as a solo practice/process without necessarily encountering the traditional ways of engaging and questioning the mind processes as the practice develops. Not only when beginning meditation, but later if the practice wanes a bit, we find ourselves frustratingly controlled by deep stress once again because: life. It’s ideal to internalize helpful tenets especially for such times. Maybe all of this is kind of for naught if it isn’t gleamed by experience of personal insight or minor revelation or small satori. Which I guess means, practice is what matters. But practice without clear or broader instructions will have unclear results or usefulness.

The ultimate (actually real) conspiracy is that every person is being lied to—by their own selves. Without observing and questioning the motivations behind our habitual thoughts within and beyond meditation, we’ll endlessly compare ourselves directly to the hollow and arbitrary and uninformed partially visible minutiae of other people—fantasies. The mind concocts endless fantasies with no substance; total illusions, stolen time. Perhaps there’s a functional evolutionary reason the mind does this, but who cares about that?