The Epic of Existence

I'm typing this from the cafe at the ground floor of the hospital. The place is relatively quiet on Sundays and I'm taking a brief break from my routine of attending to my mother here at the ward. It has been a rather stressful few days but I hope the worst is over.

I realised that, despite the lack of sleep and the long days that I had spent here, I'm actually not very tired--very much less tired than my usual working days. Perhaps it is the break from the computer screen that feels 'refreshing' to me.

I might have to go back to work soon and this 'holiday' has given me a fresh perspective on work and life. One thing's for sure: material success has never been an effective motivator for me. Whenever I find myself drifting towards that direction, my mind recoils from it. 

I treat work as a kind of sport--you play hard to win but, at the end of the day, it's just like another game, which has no real significance in the larger scheme of things. This doesn't diminish its importance; it merely reframes it.

We humans look for meaning in everything we do, because the mind is a story generating machine. Having 'meaning' means having a 'reason' for everything we do or observe. It is the way our brain has evolved. We want to comprehend why certain things happen. The explanation has to have an emotional and logical arc, which when narrated provides a sense of satisfaction and certainty. All our religious myths and political ideologies are good examples of such stories.

The fact of the matter is, a greater part of our lives have no 'meaning' in the rational sense. And there's nothing wrong with that. We do the things we do, because we've acquired what Daniel Dennett calls 'competence without comprehension'.  We have evolved culturally, infected by memes in the form of thinking tools and habits, some of which are beneficial, some not. Once infected, these habits and practices become a part of our 'competence', which is manifested instinctively or ritualistically.

Our evolved brain, which is capable of intelligently shaping the materials of the universe for its own purpose, attempts to provide a logical story retrospectively for practices and behaviours, which had evolved rather 'unconsciously'.

The tendency of the mind to latch on to stories is why we find it so hard to meditate. When we do mindfulness meditation, we try to see things clearly as they are, without entertaining any stories. In such moments of meditative silence, we see the movies in our heads clearly--our fears, angers and desires--all fragments of stories which we had composed to explain, project or justify every sequence of events in our lives.

Stories are higher level protocols of the karmic stack. More stories are generated when we operate at those higher layers, causing enormously complex karmic reactions. At the base level, we only have a causal chain of atomic events, and by paying attention to them, we allow them to play themselves out in the simplest possible manner.

Whenever a thought appears in the mind, ask yourself: what's the story here? See how each thought attempts to spin a story to start another complex chain of events.  By doing so, we save ourselves from the many wild swings between ecstasy and sorrow, which is the bane of human existence.

Remember, the mind is a spinner of stories. Only when we cease listening to them, the stories die. And when they do subside, the epic of existence reveals itself.