The reason I have been able to get so much reading done in the past couple of months is because I found myself with some Dead Time. Anytime I enter this phase of life where my movement is restricted I use it as an opportunity to improve still anyway. I don’t let myself think about how hard it will be or how long it will last. All I think about is how to make this time practical.
I’ve since moved and re-entered Alive Time, giving me more options, flexibility and freedom. And whilst reading a book every couple of days is a great way to spend Dead Time, this added movement gives me even more time to engage with other tasks, taking the resources acquired during the Dead Time to make the next phase of Alive Time even more active.
Therefore many of the books going forward may repeat from time to time simply because I’m moving with the times, engaging with the practice, including physical disciplines, remaining on the task each day but also learning deeply and experimenting with other ways to play.
Understand: there is no one way to be creative and there is no better way to spend your idle days than reading books. Be a student then, always. And be at your studies no matter where you are. No matter what you are doing.
Your real education starts the moment your formal education finishes. Once you enter this phase you are no longer constrained to any institute’s rules, but you can start the process of branching out on your own into becoming an independent researcher where the limits are endless to what you can read, learn, think and create. You must extend this knowledge accrued so far but push it now to the maximum, carving out a path of your own. Getting a job during this phase is essential in order to support your continued research. However, you are to stay on this path now, not only until you make a discovery, but for the rest of your life.
Set yourself a goal each day of one thing you can accomplish towards the attainment of an improved mind. Pick up a new book on any subject and read one chapter per day. Then, whatever you find interesting, use it, then move onto the next. Explore a plethora of subjects extending your range of experience into multiple fields and discover patterns across several areas of knowledge and expertise. Do this each day alongside your work. You need time to add more to the storehouse of your imagination. Therefore read to add, but write to think.
Continue to publish these findings as you go. The more you engage with this practice, the more you will discover from publishing each unfinished draft that will require further editing. As you cannot learn to think more clearly until you first commit the thought on paper in order to then think it through more deeply. Put out what you have, but continually work in the back until you make it the best possible version of it.
Anything you find interesting becomes another piece of the process, another part of the puzzle. To create pictures requires a palette so make a splash by using many colours, mixing them together, and even using the same ones over again in different places, in an attempt to find the perfect pattern.
Starting from somewhere will always be better than never starting. So even though you are not sure where to go, start from anywhere and where to go will eventually show. The perfect time does not exist. So the best thing you can do is ramp it up a notch and accelerate the process. Engage yourself in an even harder practice.
In a world where everyone is zigging, you must find a way to zag. We are now swimming in the age of information. So there is nothing you cannot learn yet there is an abundance of ways to waste your time. Many are already choosing this modal rather than making the most of it. Entertainment is fine, but an endless stream of passively watching endlessly instead of actively engaging your own mind will only lead to an inability to focus on anything that requires spending longer than minutes to hold your attention. You must make it your goal now to go the opposite way, not only keep short attention loop spans to a minimum, but to completely eradicate this. Serious strong attention to detail is slowly becoming a dying art.
Cultivate the ability to remain quiet, by yourself, in a room alone, using nothing but the power of your own mind and imagination to engage the intellect. To live distracted means to not know how to live. You must become more creatively active by making yourself do what you are more than capable of doing. Seek complexity, push for growth and achieve depth. Spend longer meditating over thoughts. And for each day that goes by, find something interesting to mediate on for that day. Mental exercise is a pleasure. So make it a daily habit.
Read something practical each day that will lead to your mental advancement.
SEEK PHILOSOPHY TO BRING YOU BACK INTO THE PRESENT
For anyone who thinks talking about death is a bit morbid, it is a fact that the complete opposite is true. As most spend their days behaving in ways as if their life were to continue indefinitely for infinitely. People try to ignore their death, as if it were never going to happen to them, to avoid facing the terror of this reality. As if not thinking about your death escapes finitude.
And humans fear this thought so much that it scares them into extreme forms of pleasure as a form of distraction to momentarily forget the fear of their reality that exists: you are mortal, born from a woman’s womb, sprang forth into a violent and unpredictable universe to a microscopic place called Earth. We are given a name, an address, develop an ego, which then gives us some sort of sense to how we relate our identity to the world. We compare and compete ourselves against others, meet friends, go to school, enjoy the experience of childhood, find a job, desire a mate, desire to be desirable, fall in love, maybe get married, have children, buy a home, raise a family and to even have dreams that can come true.
And yet, to be given all of these things for the purpose that one day you must die and give it all back. Everyone you know will die. Then you will die. Then everyone who ever knew you will die. And it will be as if you never were. As that’s how it is for all those who have already been and gone. As we never stop for a moment to ponder the past lives of those who we never knew.
Therefore this same state of affairs will also be the case for you. You will not be. And no one will know you were. Mother Nature teases us, gives us a glimpse of this momentary beauty that we get to experience, just to take all of it away from us in an instant.
We are duped. Thrown helplessly into a world relying on others to nurture us so we can eventually stand on our own two feet. And all of this, every act of effort towards everything we do, all so that one day we arrive, into a wooden box, placed six feet under, in a grave. We become worm food, a body decomposed that once gone leaves no trace of us except a plaque with our name, which itself over time will also disappear behind the names of others.
Life is beautiful. Life is wonderful. However life, is about death. Wither you like it or not, without dying there would simply be no living. And yet look at how many spend their life living, as if they were already dead.
One day all of this will end. Think about your life right now as if these were your last moments before making your final departure for eternity. Are you truly happy with how your life has turned out and every choice you have made? Are you spending time the way you hoped and wished it would be at the end? Come to see now that you have been dying since the day you were born. Each moment that passes you by is now one step closer to your grave.
The month of April is going to be all about the subject of death. Why?
So in order that you may know how to live. I’m well aware that the contents of this might either scare you or make you want to leave. As many wish to deny confronting their mortality. However the reason for this is for specifically bringing you closer into the present moment and showing you how studying death and the fact you are dying daily will bring you closer to experiencing your life from a whole new dimension, allowing you to live more presently in the moment, seeing what really matters most and therefore knowing exactly what doesn’t.
Last month’s theme was all about Alive Time, learning about the ways in order to find more to get the best and make the most of the remainder of your extremely short lifetime on Earth.
This next theme ties into where that leaves off. I wouldn’t say it’s completely finished. There will of course always be more to add later. But to keep this year interesting I’m trying to move into many areas every month to make each month exciting.
And no better way to excite you, than to talk about your death. But this isn’t without its practical purpose. The whole point is to encourage us to wake up and live more deliberately, moving away from meaningless distractions, helping us to live more fully in each day, which is another mosaic of your life. Your whole life is in itself a work of art. And so, it’s time to treat it like one.
The moment I began to study death was the moment I started to feel myself really live. I noticed I was beginning to change. Something inside of me was shifting slightly and it continued to shift the more I engaged with this. The whole point of this is not to scare you but to help you experience your life from a far more appreciative perspective, allowing you to see each day of your life, for the rest of your life, for what it really is: a miracle.
The future belongs to those who use the power of their mind. And those who don’t will be lost always giving to distractions. March was about finding flow, Alive Time. April is about taking this Alive Time and beginning to live.
And that starts by coming to terms with our common mortality. Facing our inevitable death head on so we may no longer fear it. As once you overcome this fear you will also develop the ability of no longer fearing anything.
It’s an incredibly powerful tool to bring ourselves into this higher level of awareness, so we can be far more present in absolutely everything we do.
And in doing so we will accomplish: