PRACTICE REFLECTION

“Self-awareness is a problem. We've arrived with a sense of self-awareness by a process of evolution that doesn't really care. Obviously, care I'm using loosely there because evolution doesn't care at all about anything besides its just continuation, propagation. But the experience of consciousness and self-awareness from the first-person perspective is not central to the reason for why self-awareness and consciousness arrived in the form that humans experience it.”

“As a self who is aware of that self, we attach to that self, we attach to the ideas of that self, we attach to people and things and our desire to make sense of our perception and understanding through all of the concepts that we form by nature of having that degree of awareness. And yet, reality in existence is fickle, chaotic, uncertain. We are going to lose everybody and everything through time or distance, decay, age or illness or death. And so, we find ourselves in this sort of cosmic ocean, where the waves are crashing on our heads constantly.”

“I think a lot of people have this sense that the more that they learn about themselves, the more difficult life becomes. That there's a kind of enjoyment, freedom. There's a freedom in naivety, would be a way to put it. And that the less naivety that they have, the more challenging the world seems to be. Complexity and responsibility and self-doubt and self-esteem issues come in. This tighter and tighter spiral, this ever-increasing resolution that you look at the world with, I think to a lot of people, feels like a personal curse.”

“Once you start worrying about something or once you start thinking about something, that can of worms is fully opened and you can't, you can't close it. You have to figure out how to deal with it, how to move forward. And I find that the best way to deal with those sorts of cans of worms or those tunnels is forward, not back, because backwards, that end is closed. In terms of the tunnel metaphor, you can't return to some form of yourself, some version of yourself that hasn't already wondered, questioned, pondered, or become concerned about those sorts of things.”

“If you continue on that path, you get to a point where you become more comfortable with the confusions and the uncertainties. And you don't get better at justifying them. You don't get better at dealing with the problems of being a conscious entity in the world. But you get better at recognizing that the lack of answers, the lack of stability, the lack of rigidness is par for the course and par for the beauty of the course.”