It is important to count your blessings every now and then. By making lists of the things you enjoy and appreciate out of life you are reminding yourself that life is infinitely awesome. This is an exercise I recommend for anyone while they are down or depressed. You just can not physically stay sad after recollecting so many positively-energized thoughts.
1) Putting on pajamas right after they come out of the dryer
2) Switching to the cool side of the pillow in the middle of the night
3) Waking up in the morning with a dry mouth and getting a cold beverage from the fridge (preferably orange juice)
4) Completing a long ass paper assignment
5) Waking and baking and then deciding to lay in bed for another 4 hours
6) The feeling of grass on bare feet
7) Diving into a cool-temperature pool after a hot day at the beach
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9) Milk and cookies
10) Taking a piss after six beers
11) Washing your hands, after counting and rolling hundreds of dollars in change
12) Finally getting to the toilet after a long and excruciating wait
13) That little flutter you get the first time that special someone kisses you
14) A good back massage
15) Cooking a monster of a meal and enjoying the fruit of your labor
16) Receiving a letter from an old loved one
17) Freshly baked bread
18) Visiting a foreign country and absolutely falling in love with its culture
19) Taking a nap in the sun
20) Being lazy for a whole Sunday
21) Sore muscles after a long and productive workout
22) Getting away with the consequences after making a really stupid mistake
23) Smell of BBQ on a nice summer day
24) Minty breathe right after you brush your teeth
25) Stargazing on a clear night sky
26) Finally seeing your all-time favorite band live
27) Morning thunder
28) An unexpected compliment
29) Smoking a cigarette while driving with the windows down and music blasting (good weather is a must too)
30) Smell of a good bacon, egg, toast breakfast in the morning (why not some pancakes too)
31) Hot cocoa with marshmallows after playing in the snow
32) Cool sand in between your toes on a sunny day at the beach
33) Smell of good food cooking in the other room
34) Waiting all night and finally getting to dance with that special girl/guy
35) Rollercoasters
36) Looking back on a piece of art or writing that you did a long time ago and liking it better than you remember
37) Getting a new puppy, kitten or other cool pet
38) Finding new things to ponder about
39) First cup of coffee in the morning
40) Long, hot, sweaty sex
41) Driving your brand new car
42) Coming back home after a long overdue vacation
43) Finishing a really good book
44) Discovering a new music artist that simply blows you away
45) The calm before the storm
46) Being in an airplane when it takes off
47) Completing an hour long meditation
48) Winning a game of Risk
49) Getting a hole-in-one in miniature golf (or golf in general is pretty sweet)
50) Finding the good in someone
Humans are the best learners on the planet. This is due to our highly evolved minds – and especially – our expertise in language compared to other species. We begin learning about our environment right once we leave our mother’s womb, and at a very early age our parents put us into educational institutions so we can learn the fundamentals of reading, writing and math.
One thing I have always found curious from all my years going to school is that they very rarely go over methods on how to learn. But really – How do we learn? What are the best ways to learn? And are these stupid questions?
Learning seems like common sense: we do it everyday. When in school we are told to study if we want to learn and do well in school – “Just go read, and absorb as much material as you can.” If what we want to learn is a skill, whether it be problem solving in arithmetic or throwing a baseball, then we are told “Practice makes perfect. Just keep trying until you get it.”
It took me a long time to figure out that there is actually more to learning than just reading or practicing. In fact, there is a whole mental disposition that is cohesive to thorough, quick, and even entertaining ways to learn. Here are some ideas that have guided me in the process of becoming a better learner.
A Love for Knowledge
This world is fascinating; I am constantly bewildered at its depth, beauty and level of complexities. These is a desire to learn, a desire to understand reality and to always seek the truth over delusion.
The problem is schools very rarely teach you to love knowledge. Instead, education becomes a chore, a mindless routine from 8am-3pm every Monday-Friday. In school they don’t train us to be thinkers or seekers of knowledge but regurgitators. We are taught to consumer facts and certain interpretations of history and then spit them out on our tests. There is no critical thinking at all – just consumption – the same way you consumer a Big Mac. Most teachers only care about getting the numbers to meet national standards and not about the actually passion that comes from the sharing and growth of knowledge.
This is really where our education system lacks. It is not in its lack of funding, or TV, the media, or American’s general lack of intelligence – no, it is none of this at all – it is the subtle and lifelong conditioning that becoming smart is always a tedious and burdensome process.
How often can you recall getting those one or two special teachers? We all have our favorites. The ones who captivate our minds, leave us at the edge of our desks, make us laugh and cry, and truly instill a longing satisfaction for knowledge. Why can’t every professor make things so easy, so fun, and enlightening?
The key principle to all effective teaching is quite simple: associate good feelings with your material; this way, your students will become self-motivated to do well and expand their minds.
But we aren’t so lucky to always be blessed with these kinds of teachers. Instead, teachers are more concerned with discipline and obedience. They actually believe the best way to learn is at the crack of a conquering whip and not the crack of a warm smile.
Fortunate for us – it is never too late to become a good learner, and it is never too late to become “smart.” At times, we need to step up and be our own teachers. Nowadays, this is easier than ever before.
The Well of Knowledge
I would say that I have learned more despite school rather than because of it. With technology – and especially the rise of the internet – there is no excuse for ignorance on a topic that is of interest to you. All the resources to begin your investigation are at your disposal. The internet has a wide range of media (audio, video, reading material, sometimes even games and college lectures) on just about anything there is to learn (music, photography, math, science, cooking, fashion, etc. – the list is virtually endless).
Despite the ever-growing depth of the internet, it is only the beginning of your path to knowledge. Most areas have their own local libraries even though many citizens do not ever take enough advantage of these institutions as they rightfully should. I know my local library has much more than just books too, but DVDs, CDs, computers, and other media.
Some of the reasons that your library is still a worthy alternative to the internet is that a lot of older books (including classics that may be difficult to find on the internet) are available to read, and sometimes it is fun to just walk down the aisles, browsing at your own leisure, and accidentally discovering a treat. In this way a library can introduce you to material that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to find on the internet let alone have the idea to even search for it.
Modeling the Experts
Up until this point I have mostly focused on ways to go about expanding one’s “book smarts” or, rather, knowledge about theories, facts, interpretations, or philosophies. But this is only half of learning. The other side is about learning skills and techniques, whether it be sports, hobbies, art, music, or even how to be better in social and business situations.
Now this is not to say that some of these practices cannot be aided by reading, viewing or listening material (they ALL certainly can be), but that isn’t going to complete the learning process for many of these skills.
Instead, I suggest to get familiar with the practice of modeling those who are already successful at what you want to do. This does not meaning ripping off or copying, but utilizing a wide range of influences to improve your own approach and strategy.
This is usually within the context of the “outside world” and not something you would spend time in your room studying and trying to absorb (though you can most certainly spend time alone reflecting on the lessons you learn).
Learn to pay extra careful attention when around those who are already experts in an area you want to succeed in. If you have the chance, ask questions about how they got started, what was the process like getting from Point A to Point B.
Your job as a student is to understand the groundwork and the path from getting from where you are now to the successful state you want to be in after. Ask yourself: How long might this take me? What are the future obstacles? Am I going to make the commitment to do what needs to be done?
The best way to model others is to break down the learning process into individual steps. Learn to dissect the details of honing your skills but also have the ability to zoom out and see the bigger whole when necessary. If you are able to hold both the details and the bigger picture in your mind simultaneously then all you have left to do is to act upon your ideas.
Be aware that your strategy must always be flexible and ready to change. It is not necessarily true that what works for someone will work for you, but it is most often true that you can learn at least a piece of the puzzle from various sources.
Every Moment is a Learning Opportunity
A true lover of knowledge knows there is no such thing as a useless moment. Instead, he or she realizes that every moment can be seized and there is something to learn from everybody. Even people who are not experts in a field will be able to offer you refreshingly new perspectives. In the end everyone, young and old, can be your teacher – as long as you are smart enough to be the student.
Be curious. Ask questions to everyone. It is a great way to be social, show interest in others and at the same time learn something new. Everyone has their own unique experiences and background; this is not something to be taken lightly – there is a wealth of knowledge in ever individual. Even the preschooler can show you something about yourself that you either never paid thought to before or have forgotten in your midst of maturity. Sometimes, I even prefer to talk to children who are often much more imaginative and interesting than the often more stubborn adult (who often takes more “cracking into” before unveiling a facet of wisdom).
Final Words
Being a good student is in itself a skill that must be practiced. It requires mindful attention being paid at all times and in all places and situations. Always be observant, never count a moment out as useless or a waste of time – it is only your mind that can make it so. These suggestions will not only guide you in becoming a better learner but will enrich your life in a multitude of ways. Good learners simply have more fun.
The concept of a self is central to Buddhist thought; we are told meditative practices are intended to expand one’s self-awareness and to ultimately lead to a letting go of the self in order to distinguish one’s suffering (or all the dissatisfactions that come from being a conscious, experiencing being).
From my observation humans do not typically react well to the notion of a no self. To deny the self entirely seems to be akin to denying one’s own existence. If there is no me – if there is no I – then who is there? Who is there experiencing what I perceive to be as my life?
What is the self?
René Descartes once famously said, “cogito ergo sum,” or, “I think therefore I am.” I believe in these simple words Descartes had rightfully equated the thinking mind with the self. The voice in our head that reasons, postulates, and creates – this is the stream of consciousness we typically attribute to our voice. Only delusional schizophrenics seem to attribute voices in their head to the identity of someone else but the self.
The thinking mind is also the conceptual mind. Thinking in and of its self is purely conceptual. We cannot think without concepts, and we cannot conceptualize without thinking.
With that in mind, take a minute and be aware of just how many concepts arise within just a few quiet seconds. Even just take the simple thought: “I have work to do,” and list how many concepts you depend on to make any sense of that thought. There is the concept of work, the concept of having, the concept of doing, and of course the concept of I, better known as the concept of a self: the center of our conceptual world in which all our experiences relate to.
The conceptual mind includes all of our life story, our memories, and the meanings of all these remembered events that have happened to us. We assume all of our life’s events to have had happened to the same person or thing; and we call this the self.
There is not a single concept we have that doesn’t in some way or another relate back to the self. Without the self, all experiences would be disjointed and meaningless. The concept of a self is one of the first things the thinking mind must conceptualize to make any sense of his or her environment. All other conceptions build off of concepts in relation to the self.
The “No Self” in Compassion
One of the most useful notions of no self is when building one’s compassion towards others. By taking one’s self out of the picture, one can become more finely tuned to the wants and needs of others.
It is all too easy to get caught up in our interests to the self and forget that there is a whole world outside of our narrow windowed reality. I do not want to turn this section into an argument about my idea of the proper morality, but I think if one learns to observe karma (the laws of cause and effect) one will find that helping others is one of the greatest gifts and greatest highs one can get out of life (surely better than any drug you can find).
To truly be a being of compassion one needs to practice the removal and dissociation of the desires of one’s self. Acting on the petty desires of the self is a road towards delusion, harm, and sadness. If one is always placing concern in the self, and never others, one begins to lose a sense of purpose – meaning – and the sense of contribution and worthiness to one’s society and world.
To dismantle the self for the sake of compassion is like a breathe of fresh air. No longer do you need to be always striving, pushing, forcing the self to obtain what it desires. Too much of the self becomes burdensome and tiring. It sucks up the richness out of life and leaves one pale, shriveled, and rotting, like a fruit left out in the sun too long. Do not bask in the self for too long, spread your seeds to others and aid others in their growth as many have done for you in the past.
The “No Self” in Non-attachment
Compassion is certainly a form of non-attachment to the self, but in this section I will explain a form of non-attachment that may be of interest for more self-ish reasons.
If we put the self as the focus of attention (such as what is done in meditation) we notice a peculiar property of the self: it is always changing. This goes back to the very nature of the self as a product of the conceptual mind. What we perceive of our self today is slightly different than how we perceived our self yesterday and vastly different than how we perceived our self ten or twenty years ago.
As mentioned previously, the self is a product of our beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, and emotions regarding events in the past and our predictions for the future. But we are constantly experiencing new things moment by moment, thus our conception of the self is constantly reshaping itself and evolving.
Despite this truth, we still cling to certain ideas about our self. Perhaps we have a long history of failures with dating or school – we begin to think that our self is simply not a good dater or not a good student. If we hold onto these beliefs – they become self-fulfilling – and we fall deeper down the hole of false conceptions.
But the sooner we can let go of these false “selves” (the self who is a failure at X, or the self who doesn’t do Y) the sooner we can improve our selves. What we need to accept is that it is not typically something inherit in us that causes us to act in such a way (excluding any biological dispositions), but it is simply our strategy or method of doing something that has failed.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, the notion of no self is just as truth-revealing as it is empowering. It can be used to help others or to guide one’s own improvement. Learn to not think of the self as a concrete thing, but as a process – we can call this “self-ing”. Be aware of how and when you are self-ing and become better at avoiding the consequences of clinging to these false selves. I hope this helps.
The phrase “free market” gets thrown around a lot. Many people who use this term fail to ever reflect on its meaning. Republicans and those on the right typically claim that we need to preserve the free markets, and that Obama’s current policies are destroying free markets. Meanwhile, Democrats and those on the left like to claim that the free market doesn’t exist, and that it is a fictional utopia concocted by proponents of capitalism.
What both of these parties have failed to do before making their claims is to define what a free market really is. Republicans – what are you saying we should protect? And democrats – what are you saying doesn’t exist?
Definition Of An Ideal Free Market
I cannot speak for others but, like the Republicans and Democrats, I do have some things to say regarding the “free market”. So before I state some of my views I will try my best to first begin by defining what a free market actually is to me.
To me, the free market is when all individuals in the marketplace cooperate voluntarily without the use of coercion. Hence – economic decisions are agreed on freely by only the parties involved in each transaction – and there is no force acted upon by the state, or government.
An immediate stumbling block to this idea is: What if people don’t act voluntarily with one another? For example – criminals or gangs who steal property from others. Because criminals use coercive force to steal properties from their otherwise rightful owner I would permit the state to use coercive force only so much as to protect these property rights as to where they rightfully belong. This is why criminals and people who steal go to jail for the misdeeds. Criminals undermine the free market by initiating force, which is not a valid means of exchange in what would otherwise be only free and voluntary economic transactions.
If a man does not keep his end of a contract, that too is an undermining of the voluntary decisions of individuals. It is a kind of fraud, and it cheats legitimate and honest individuals in the free market system (and thus, cheats the free market itself). Therefore, I also believe it is the job of the state to protect these contracts in order to preserve voluntary, and what I would call true, economic behavior.
Other than these protections by the state (property rights, contract rights and fraud), the state would be out of economic affairs completely if we wanted to call this a pure free market system.
The Ontology Of The Free Market
In what way does this free market exist? As anti-capitalists rightfully point out: empirical reality is much more blurry than the clear-cut ideals of the free market. Free marketers like to tout how free markets are all about a non-coercive economic playing field. But things are not so simple.
The United States current marketplace is very-mixed, quite far away from the pure free market that I described above. In fact our current market breaks just about every free market ideal. We have regulations for almost every industry, subsidies for businesses in various sectors of the economy, an enforced monetary system, as well as government monopolies like the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrak.
The ideal free market that people so commonly support has, for all intents and purposes, never existed in our country’s history. Even by the end of George Washington’s presidential term we had our first central bank – a plainly non-free market institution.
In this sense, anti-capitalists are right: the free market is an abstract concept that has no basis in empirical reality. There is no time in our history, or in the history of any other nation that we could say we have had a free market.
But – was the free market ever intended to identify an empirical reality? Or is the free market merely a theoretical construct that may guide our understanding of empirical information? Certainly there is no economist that can reference a specific economic society and claim: “That was the free market!” But we could – and economists often do – look at particular economies and can make the judgment that they are “more free market” or “less free market.”
Why would an abstract concept be ignored simply due to its inability to be directly observed in the natural world? Is that the very nature of what makes an abstract concept? Is a concept that is abstract mean it is not useful in a epistemological sense? What if that concept is concretely defined?
Take for example the concept of a perfect circle or the number pi. Neither of these can be found in the real world, they are only theoretical; however, we still use these concepts to guide our understanding of real world phenomena!
Final Words
Instead of thinking of the free market as a specimen that can be observed in the “real world,” perhaps we are better off thinking of it as a lens out of which we observe – it’s the free market perspective – and it is a very real way of observing economic behaviors and making sense of them. The free market is a measuring stick, a tool of observation, not a formula for an ideal society. It is a way to determine how much freedom individual’s have in their economic activity. And if you are one to believe that freedom is the key ingredient to peace and prosperity for a society, then the free market perspective is something worth understanding.
We all have those days where we are just completely under the weather. We cannot wait for the day to end – but why should we? What is stopping us from ending this downward spiral right now. What is there holding us in a negative stronghold but ourselves?
How can we set ourselves free? Not tomorrow, not next week – but right now?
The quick answer: we need to dissociate from our unpleasantness. We can only dissociate by replacing ourselves into a new associative role, one of pleasantness, not against it.
So wait – how do we stop being depressed? Be happy? Isn’t that the goal, not the solution? Well, it is actually both! It only takes an instant or a moment to change one’s mental state. We can do this without the help of any external factors; all we need is our mind.
This morning I became very aggravated very quickly. I couldn’t find the book I was planning on reading later, I burnt my breakfast, I got a call from my Mom wanting me to run a line of errands, its absolutely pouring outside, and I realized I am extremely low on cash. I was pissed off. I was one more straw away from going to the nearest wall and planting my fist on the other side.
Then I paused. I’ve taught myself throughout the years that when things are bad sometimes all it takes is a quick step backwards to put it all back into perspective. This is dissociating from the present moment. It is useful, especially during times when you are busy and running in auto-pilot mode.
But then you can’t stay dissociated forever, you need to eventually step back into yourself and continue your day. But when you do step back into yourself, make sure you associate with the pleasant and happy side of yourself, not the negative and aggravated one.
When you associate into your happy self – what should your happy self be doing? Smiling, of course. But what else can you add?
For a moment, try thinking of yourself as a customizable video game character. What are all the cool things you can add to your happy self? What type of behaviors would he or she do? How would they walk throughout their day? Add a little pop to your walk. Erect your posture. Do a little dance. These are all free ways to get a quick high out of life.
Can’t sing? Do it anyway. No, really – it is an order. I can’t sing for the life of me, but I get the greatest, most selfish, and pleasant joy out of it.
When I went downstairs to get myself a snack today, I was in a much different state then when I was this morning. I danced around the table. Made goofy sounds with my mouth: beat-boxing, whistling, singing, and whatever else my lips, tongue and vocal chords are capable of. I gave a couple of punches into the air as if I were Rocky. It’s all-good. Make life a celebration. Sure, my dogs gave me a couple weird looks and then stared at each other in disbelief, but that is just another part of the joy.
The idea here is to enrich your personal life in the most easy and effortless ways as possible. When you are by yourself and in the comfort of your own home you have no excuse to hold back your potential for glee. Make the most of it: be creative, be simple, be happy.