An Unusual Meditation Lesson

One power of meditation is in how it clears your mind. It’s like putting on a better pair of glasses. You look at the same scene, but new details come out that can radically change your context.

Lately my meditation and mindfulness practice is externally focused. I’m cleaning up the windowpane to the outer world. How do other people think? What motivates people who are unlike me? What new knowledge is to be gained for me, now, by pondering the existence of the billions of other humans on earth?

And this is the idea that is hitting me: We are intensely irrational creatures. I think people, on average, are way less rational than we tend to think. We think of ourselves as being maybe 80% rational, when we’re really 20% rational at best.

The More You Look, The Crazier People Seem

On the surface, we want to believe that humankind is mostly rational. We have our quirks, but we’re mostly operating in “2+2=4” mode.

I now suspect the opposite. We’re in “2+2=5” mode. The society we inhabit in 2018 has not changed the ancient hardware of the human body and mind. All of the bright lights and loud noises of modern life make us crazy.

The rational fact is that we want to be happy and live ethical lives. Yet when you look close, we struggle to do the basics well. Many of us barely manage to keep our bedrooms clean or to put away 5-10% of income for monetary savings. We stay up late watching TV or smoking too much weed or whatever it is, not because it makes rational sense, but because it feels good.

We’re not wired to feel good based on living a simple, rational life. We feel good (in a chemical, short-term, “natural” sense) through our immediate pleasures. Food and sex and drugs are so central to life for this reason, they’re immediate and primal.

No matter how smart or elevated in society you become, the primal forces are there. They’re as dangerous as ever.

The Wealthy Stay Safe, The Rest Fight in the Jungle

Maybe the wealthy can stay relatively “safe” from this stuff. They can buy healthy food, maintain social power / influence, and avoid being under the thumb of an oppressor.

The rest of us, working with what we have, bounce around like pinballs in the game of life.

We go from a fast food breakfast to a long shift at work to whatever party or concert is going on in town that night. It’s not a carefully planned, rational life. It’s a hectic journey through the jungle, where nobody is safe and you can’t turn back.

We lack self-awareness and we lack awareness that others lack self-awareness. Most people are running around chasing happiness in a deep fog of war. Don’t assume rational action or successful planning, almost ever.

I don’t think this is a bad thing necessarily. The adventure life is the life I love.

The bad thing is to mistake it for something else… to think that society is built on rationality. Not these days, my friends. Life is danger and all you can do is stave off the danger for as long as possible…

Preparing for the presence of chaos is the only defense you’ve got.

At least we can start with some meditation, to become more mindful and see it how it is.

What do you think, do you think people are mostly rational? Or mostly wild and crazy?