Segmentation in Mindful Appreciation

As moments, characteristics, and options keep coming faster and faster, many lose their individual gravitas and meaning. This most often happens to degrees--not all at once. But there is certainly the possibility in meditation for depersonalization and derealization. Even without that feeling of a little too much limbo, you can practice moment-to-moment mindfulness and look around at some point as if you're standing in the middle of a field somewhere, wondering how you got there and where to go. You can get a similar effect sitting in a small apartment and spending lots of time online: searching, browsing, chatting, moving on. It's happening in "real time" but eventually doesn't feel all that real because it isn't apparently rooted. Mindfulness should actually bring us in closer touch with our roots while allowing us to be less defined and delimited by them.

The same sort of thing happens in a different context with hierarchy. It's how accountability disappears from big government and big corporations. If, say, the job of massacring Jews is broken down so that everyone in the chain is a specialist with some separation from the previous and subsequent steps, most of them will simply do their jobs and stop thinking about the overall result. "I just drive trains." Never mind that those trains are carrying cars full of people to death camps. You get cheating accountants and investors and Michael Vick saying stuff like, "It didn't seem real," until they end up in jail, and, "That's when it hit me." Aren't those Jews, those dollars, those mortgages just numbers on papers or a monitor?

So when we deal in hierarchy and segmentation, we want to look at integration and rootedness. We want to keep some awareness of the foundation that our space shuttle mover is built upon; we want to know that if we're going to spend a gazillion dollars that someone is sure of how one part made by one manufacturer fits with the parts around it made by all other manufacturers involved with creating a huge crawler. As we climb higher in most endeavors, we have to consider how the center of gravity also tends to move upwards, making the entire structure a little less stable unless we plan for that shift at the core. In constructing a skyscraper, the first step after design and planning for materials is to dig--dig it deep.

The flipside is that, when you're deep into your stupidly righteous anger (if you happen to be somewhat like me) or affected by an addiction or OCD or whatever, it can be really helpful to segment time--to take one step at a time, one day at a time, one moment at a time, one breath at a time. Overall, it's good when a feeling of being rooted or centered is accessible and it's good when a feeling of openness is accessible. So along with having some aspiration for growth, it's great to have an appreciation for the way that things already are and have been. Zimbardo did some interesting work on time perspectives.

One of the strangest things that can happen with meditation groups is that they take up the idea of being only in the present. Being lost in the present is similar to being lost anywhere else. If you only look at the present--or "be" in the present--then, in the present, you're intentionally ignoring a lot of your potential, intentionally ignoring. If you're in a monastery or it works for you otherwise, congratulations, but it won't work for most people. Aesop said so, and I think he was right. It's good to plan for winter.

The interesting thing about planning and experience, though, is that they can take the form of heuristics, general ideas about how to go with the flow in such a way as to set yourself up for success without being rigid. Precise mindfulness and the ability to be in the present complements that experience, those heuristics, and any planning that we can actually follow through with based on experience and the ability to plan.

One of the most fascinating things that occurs in how our brains and minds work is the corner we turn at about 10,000 hours of experience with some particular field or endeavor. When I talk about an associational matrix, I'm leaning towards this qualitative change that comes with expert experience because even though you may not realize it, you want an associational matrix of experience to draw from. When we intend to learn and improve, it sometimes takes time, but we can usually do it. If we stick with that intention and practice for long enough, we get to a point where the effort pays off mentally. Things just start coming more easily. The book THE WISDOM PARADOX gets into it a little bit. A common example is driving. When you start learning how to drive, you're always thinking about checking mirrors, the gas gauge, other drivers, wondering whether you're going to get the clutch right on your next shift, etc. But at some point, over a period of time, you ease into driving. You do most of those same things but not all the time and with less effort and less stress. Driving begins to seem pretty easy and natural for most of us. Like riding a bike. And then we conveniently forget how difficult it was to learn. Same thing happens when talented high school athletes think they know a sport, only to find that it is faster, harder, and more complex at the college level...and then there are the pros.

So actually, there are at least two major corners that we turn. With driving, most of us get to where we are competent but not expert. Competence brings that sense of ease and most of us are relatively safe drivers. But we aren't professional stunt drivers or Nascar-quality competitors. Those folks get familiar with performing at a high level, an expert level, whereas the rest of us tend to get comfortable with competence. No longer newbies, but no Mario Andretti.

Keeping one foot in the present, so to speak, can become as practiced as shifting gears. We get used to looking at various mirrors, other cars, pedestrians, street signs, etc. We can similarly get used to looking at memories, impulses, expectations, creative plans, feeling disciplined, being present, etc. As the moments "shorten" and experience with intentionally shifting attention accrues, the moments and circumstance can blend together. Some people talk about this blending and flow as "process". Once we have a rich enough associational matrix and enough practice with the contents, we can shift our focus from comparatively slow-footed emphasis on content to a comparatively fluid awareness of process. But when we start practicing this shift, we have to put the effortful and incompetent practice into following briefer and smaller aspects of content. In the same way that our brains and minds turn a corner at about 10,000 practice hours, we eventually can become familiar and easier in our mindful attention of the present. It's 10,000 hours to get to the expert level, but we can usually achieve a journeyman's competence long before that. So we're looking for a fluid process that is connected to the present but also something other than a segmentation of time that leaves us rudderless, lost, and without meaning (solid reference points as context). Even in the midst of a fast-flowing mountain river, we can know where the banks and the river bottom are.