This month I’ve been fascinated by meditation. At the end of last year, I got interested after I heard that meditation is the best way to learn about our minds and reality, from Yuval Noah Harari in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. I’ve been following Sam Harris’s meditation course. I think it’s profound.

Motivation

• To always know that I don’t have to react to every thought and feeling that crosses my mind.
• To be able to choose which thoughts to pay attention to, and which thoughts to let go of. 

Realisations

I am not my thoughts or controlled by them. I’m not my feelings either. I’m also not my brain.

We experience fleeting sensations and thoughts in each moment. Thoughts are just like sounds, they come into our awareness and then disappear on their own.

Our minds make meanings of raw sensations from our bodies. Emotions are interpretations of raw sensations of the body. These body sensations are often triggered by thoughts. Scary thoughts, worrying thoughts, calming thoughts.

Things we see are interpretations of lights on the retina. Sounds we hear are interpretations of vibrations of the eardrum. We don’t know as much about reality as we think.

Many things that we identify as things only exist in our minds. For example, the fruit orange is an idea that only exists in our minds. Before an orange become an orange, it is a seed and atoms elsewhere. After an orange is cut and eaten, it’s no longer an orange. So an orange is only a snapshot of a process. And in many ways, we are similar to oranges.

Our experience of the past is memories, and our experience of the future is expectations. They are mostly thoughts. We only have what we experience in each moment. Our attention makes things meaningful to us. Choosing what to pay attention to is how we live our lives.

P.S. I loved this book My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. It sheds some light on how our minds work.

• meditation
• the mind