Mindful Wisdom

The Tension Between Being and Becoming: Pursuing Peace and Spirituality in the 21st Century

There is a tension between being and becoming, which is present in every moment of our lives.
Spirituality is an answer to the question of how to be fulfilled in the present moment, in the midst of whatever is happening.
The spiritual domain focuses on being at peace in the contemplative sense, even while making great effort to accomplish things.
The healthy mode of becoming subsumes our ethical lives and focuses on what is good to do, positive, and pro-social.
Happiness is not predicated on getting things done, but on recognizing that fulfillment isn't based on the next good thing.
Impermanence is an unending series of problems to be solved, and finding a mode of being at peace with it is where the contemplative life comes in.
Meditation is a way of sinking into the present moment regardless of what else is being struggled with.
Spirituality is an approach to well-being that isn't predicated on seeking to become happy through wealth, health, or fitness.
The spiritual piece of spirituality is about paying attention in the present moment to avoid unnecessary suffering.
Much of the time, we're lost in thought, and meditation is a way of breaking that spell and waking up from the dream of discursivity and identification with thought.
Spirituality is a word that is still necessary to use, but we need to be wise curators of the totality of human conversation to find what is worthy of credence.
Ethics and morality are a question of what to do next and how to navigate the total space of possible experience collectively and individually.The Importance of Openness and Flexibility in the Face of New Challenges
Humans have ancient genes but are now armed with nuclear weapons, the internet, and AI technology.
The challenge is to solve massive coordination problems and cooperate peacefully with 8 billion strangers.
Legacy thought structures are not well-suited to these new opportunities and challenges.
Being dogmatic and closed to new evidence and arguments is not the best operating system for the mind.
A modern wisdom tradition that is non-sectarian and non-dogmatic is needed for humanity.
Institutions and norms that have worked for centuries should be conserved, but there is also a need for tinkering and an iterative process.
The waking up part of meditation involves recognizing the availability of the open condition in which everything spontaneously appears.
The mature approach to meditation practice recognizes that consciousness is already there, regardless of its current contents.
The purification model of meditation involves strategically being aware of thoughts and emotions to de-identify from them.
Dualistic mindfulness teaches the difference between being lost in thought and witnessing it from the point outside of it.
Psychological health and wise living require the ability to unhook from negative emotions more and more quickly.
There are more impersonal and ethically necessary modes for emotions like moral outrage that are useful for reacting to grave injustice.Managing Outrage and Changing Incentives for a Better World
Outrage can be a useful emotion in driving action towards a compassionate engagement with the world.
It is important to be cautious and skeptical of one's own emotional hijacking and ensure that outrage is not born out of personal, egocentric reactions.
Outrage can have the character of contraction and feel like anger, but it is not necessarily anger or hatred.
It is possible to view people as equivalent to forces of nature and recognize that luck plays a massive role in life outcomes.
As a global civilization, we should aim to engineer a tide that raises the level upon which most or all boats rise.
It is never useful to be privately seething with outrage that has no outlet, so it is essential to figure out what can be done pragmatically to accomplish anything useful.
Meditation is a superpower that can help let go of negative emotions when there is nothing to do.
Improving individuals is not enough to make the world a better place; changing incentives at the system level is essential.
Many systems of incentives are aligned to make it hard to be a good person, and conversely, normal people can be lured into behaving like psychopaths in a badly-tuned system.
Designing systems where ordinary, conflicted, and mediocre people can behave more like saints is crucial.
The problem of climate change requires a system of incentives, economic opportunities, and technologies that make it easier to be wise with respect to carbon footprint.
The extraction of cobalt from Congo, which is used in batteries for electric cars, is a litany of horrors, including slave labor and child labor, and needs to be solved ethically.Sam Harris on Individual vs. Systemic Change, Effective Altruism, and Managing News Consumption
Sam Harris discusses how individual actions alone cannot solve systemic problems such as the Cobalt supply chain issue in electric vehicles.
He emphasizes the need for collective solutions and coordination at the system and institution level to address climate change concerns.
Harris acknowledges that individuals can set up systems and institutions, but decision-makers at the top also play a crucial role in creating change.
Taxing carbon instead of incomes could disincentivize pollution and encourage people to find ways to reduce harm.
Harris discusses the "effective altruism" movement, which focuses on doing good in a systematic and reliable way, rather than being driven solely by emotions or compelling stories.
He has decided to give a minimum of 10% of his pre-tax income to effective charities, as identified by organizations such as givewell.org, regardless of whether he finds them personally engaging or not.
This decision has helped him clarify his relationship with giving and allowed him to outsource the cognitive labor of identifying effective charities.
Harris recently deleted his Twitter account, which he had been using as a news filter, as it had become toxic and misleading.
He found that Twitter was amplifying stories that were not representative of the world, and he was getting a misleading signal about their salience.
Harris acknowledges that meditation and unhooking from negative emotions can help, but he was spending too much time in a deranging and unhealthy space.
As a podcaster who criticizes both the right and left politically, Harris gets pain from both sides and experiences misrepresentations and lying about his views.
He was continually getting sucked into trying to clarify misunderstandings on Twitter, but he realized that clarification was not always possible, leading him to delete his account.