Zephyrus
Tyrants and Slaves
So I had my first group therapy session yesterday. It's a program called "Minfulness" that focuses on cultivating our abilities to "be in the moment" instead of constantly dwelling in the past or uncertain futures.
It was incredibly irritating, mostly in that it made me realize just how messed up my mind is. We spent 2 hours staring at raisins and lying on the floor trying to pay attention to our bodily sensations. The idea is that by focusing on these things and pulling our wandering minds back to it we thereby exercise our ability to focus attention and "be in the moment." It was awful. I couldn't feel any sensations and my mind just couldn't focus on things so meaningless as.
It was like we had to see beauty and meaning in the fact that we never stop to contemplate all the colors of a raisin or all the sensations we experience while eating it. All my mind could do was go elsewhere into some rational world tangentially related to the raisin, thinking that its colors were merely relative to how our brains interpret electromagnetic wavelengths, or how the raisin is a seed that contains some doomed Aristotelian or Hegelian potentiality.
It made me realize that I lack presence in pretty much everything I do. It's all a means to an end. Nothing is intrinsically meaningful to me anymore. Life is just a means to death. I'm failing to draw any spiritual fulfillment from contemplating the process or disinterested knowledge as for its own sake.
I'm glad that I'm not sedating myself anymore. Lately I've been able to produce when I have extrinsic obligations to do so (academic demands, mainly); but I wonder if the Adderral is making this severe ADD worse by making my brain dependent on it for focus at the expense of exercising its ability to do so on its own. Then again, the two could work in tandem toward the same goal. But here I am talking about ends without valuing the means.
I'm committed to this 8-week program. I have to set aside an hour a day for meditative practices, namely a "body scan" in which I lie down and listen to a recording that guides some exploration of my somatic sensations. I've recognized the problem, and that the solution seems so repugnant is the best evidence that it's a real problem. In the end perhaps I'll stop living this quasi-gnosticism that has estranged my mind not only from my own body, but from the whole world around me.
It was incredibly irritating, mostly in that it made me realize just how messed up my mind is. We spent 2 hours staring at raisins and lying on the floor trying to pay attention to our bodily sensations. The idea is that by focusing on these things and pulling our wandering minds back to it we thereby exercise our ability to focus attention and "be in the moment." It was awful. I couldn't feel any sensations and my mind just couldn't focus on things so meaningless as.
It was like we had to see beauty and meaning in the fact that we never stop to contemplate all the colors of a raisin or all the sensations we experience while eating it. All my mind could do was go elsewhere into some rational world tangentially related to the raisin, thinking that its colors were merely relative to how our brains interpret electromagnetic wavelengths, or how the raisin is a seed that contains some doomed Aristotelian or Hegelian potentiality.
It made me realize that I lack presence in pretty much everything I do. It's all a means to an end. Nothing is intrinsically meaningful to me anymore. Life is just a means to death. I'm failing to draw any spiritual fulfillment from contemplating the process or disinterested knowledge as for its own sake.
I'm glad that I'm not sedating myself anymore. Lately I've been able to produce when I have extrinsic obligations to do so (academic demands, mainly); but I wonder if the Adderral is making this severe ADD worse by making my brain dependent on it for focus at the expense of exercising its ability to do so on its own. Then again, the two could work in tandem toward the same goal. But here I am talking about ends without valuing the means.
I'm committed to this 8-week program. I have to set aside an hour a day for meditative practices, namely a "body scan" in which I lie down and listen to a recording that guides some exploration of my somatic sensations. I've recognized the problem, and that the solution seems so repugnant is the best evidence that it's a real problem. In the end perhaps I'll stop living this quasi-gnosticism that has estranged my mind not only from my own body, but from the whole world around me.
. What's wrong with him?
