Max CPU Priority: Window
How efficient would a computer be that ran non-stop for decades, with no cleanup of any sort? With almost every program it had ever started lingering in memory way longer than it was needed, and many of them never stopping at all, even if they were worse-than-useless, virus-infested, outdated crap you never wanted in the first place? What if it was rarely, if ever, powered down or rebooted, and when things crashed, you just had to wait for them to "fix themselves", if they ever did; or keep going with whatever functionality you had left?
Even the Windows box your Grandma runs isn't *that* badly-off, probably — but your human mind IS.
That fear-pattern from when you were four? Probably still running. Maybe you know full well when it goes active again, or maybe you don't — maybe its output over the years has gotten so garbled that it's no longer obvious why you're stressed or sick or angry or have nightmares — but it's there.
The bad habits you learned from unhealthy relationships or bad experiences in your long-gone past? Pretty darn likely to come right back out the next time you try to access the "relationships" or other relevant folder. They may be application-specific, but just because you don't see them every day doesn't mean they're gone.
The frustration from work last week? Still raising your blood-pressure whenever you think about it, or see that guy — and why? To what purpose exactly?
Humiliation from grade-school?
Self-esteem from that time someone close to you said you were fat or ugly?
Overindulging from a scarcity-message your hippocampus got ages ago?
Yup. These things might get covered up in the noise of other things — and you may be (like me) very, very good at finding ways to drown them out temporarily, by cranking the volume on other things, or seeking the external experiences that pull your attention in so fully that you can ignore the noise in your head — but unless you know how to turn them *off*, and have, they're still running.
This is what makes up what I call "a Psychology": A glut of old programming, never relevant to the moment you're in, playing like a whole roomful of screens running commercials and re-runs while you're trying to watch today's episode. Exactly that useful to your clarity and experience of this, now. And while even a Psychology made of all rainbows and unicorns would be useless and detrimental, most of ours aren't; many of those old programs are malicious, broken, or simply conflicting with each other in ways that are doing worse than hurting our efficiency: They're crippling us, with pain, with anxiety, with fear, depression, distraction, selfishness, and a terrible loneliness that never really stops for most people.
In contrast to the Psychology part of the brain, there's the Window: This is the stuff going on now; the code you actually want running. (I call it the Window partly because of its seeing-the-world function, and partly because of the analogy to the Window Manager aspect of an OS.) The Window sees, feels, listens, and processes all the data both inside and outside you right now.
Let's face it: Most of us have about 10% of our minds, if that, dedicated to the Window's operations at any given time. Fully 90% is taken up by old, irrelevant, and maybe broken shit.
A reboot is dead necessary, and I think everybody knows it — in fact I think almost all pleasure-seeking is misguided looking for a reboot.
Being able to power down the Psychology programs, even just once in a while, so that the Window could run unimpeded, would be wonderful.
And of course, what would be best, what would really be optimal, is to just leave the Psychology stuff off unless we needed it. Might I want to remember being four, or to call up my knowledge of what food scarcity feels like, or to remember that I was angry at Bob From Accounting last week? Sure I might. And those things being etched in my brain as they are, it's totally possible to run them — in fact, one could easily argue that with more available processor, it'd be a lot easier to find and run the relevant ones — but having all that shit on all the time is just silly.
Worse than silly. Bafflingly dumb.
The prevailing opinion seems very like Grandma's opinion about operating systems: Of course all that shit is running in the background from the first day I turned the thing on, whether or not I know what it is or need it or want it, because surely it would take some superhuman magician to know how to uninstall a thing!
And I think we all know what I might say in response to that. (And then I would apologize profusely for swearing at a Grandma. But I'd still say it.)
This is my 3D thing from the last post: I'm teaching myself to uninstall.
I'm getting used to using the Off switch, or at least looking for it (it's not intuitive to find from the position we usually occupy — rather like Grandma wanting to find the power-supply off-switch from her chair — but I know where to look, and I find it more easily every time).
I'm someone who, a while ago, started installing some monitoring widgets, and now I'm fed up with how much of my power is going to waste, and how crippled parts of my awesome system still are thanks to shit that I didn't download and didn't give permissions to and don't want.
MY mind. MY life. And FINITE — it's either control it now, or shuffle blindly towards the grave, a sick caricature of the zombies that we hilariously think are sick caricatures of us.
I have root here, dammit.
7 comments
Wonderful metaphor (I have a friend who says every insight about reality is a metaphor) for enlightenment, for all effective psychotherapy, for why and how most approaches to meditation work, etc.
What specifically do you do when you find a program running you want to uninstall? To temporarily shut down?
what a well-written post! this is a great analogy, and i think you've topped yourself to a highlight post of sweet prose here.
keep uninstalling, defragmenting, upgrading and installing new stuff!
LOL thank you, Sorcerer! Sometimes I feel like I ought to be paying you for your comments. ;)
Kalen, it’s not easy to argue that *Reality* isn’t a metaphor, so hell yeah. ;)
I can say a lot about the “how” (and hope I will be able to say more as I learn more), but because brevity is always a good exercise for me, here’s my attempt at the short version: You can’t stop trains of thought with thoughts; that’s like (exactly like) trying to stop a fire by shoveling fuel onto it. But — and this is key — consciousness, awareness, does not equal thinking. You can be awake and aware and not thinking; it’s just difficult if you aren’t used to it. The most useful tool I have right now (though I know of many, and different ones definitely work best for different people at different times) is to force my attention into my body: To focus on the feeling of breathing, the movement of energy, the sensation of aliveness and the responses I’m getting from my senses, both the big usual ones and the small often-ignored ones, like muscle-tension, skin galvanicity, and so forth. In other words, I press CTRL-TAB and switch focus — literally — to the Window.
Doing this doesn’t always immediately shut off the babble from my Psychology, but it does stop feeding it, and given a few moments, it will slow and eventually stop. It takes more than a little effort to sustain that long, and mentally it feels a little like doing long math without a pencil, but it’s getting easier. Also, the more I switch focus, the more depth I seem able to get in the new focus: just like there are many different configurations of thoughts, there seems to be quite a variety in feelings of non-thinking; and the really intense ones are, well, nigh-orgasmically awesome to be honest. I’ve only had a few tiny glimpses of them, so I’m not talking about that part much yet; for now, just being able to slow the runaway hounds of the unnecessary programs in my head is a ridiculous win. ;)
Thanks!!
PD
Shiftng your attention/focus to the Window as a way to "Quiet" (or starve!) what you're calling the Psychology makes sense. And I don't think the shift has to be specifically to what is going o in your body, though of course that's a widely used technique. I learned an approach called Re-Evaluation Counseling at one point, whose aim was to dissolve "recordings" of past trauma etc. One of their contributions was a whole set of what they called "Present Time techniques." Essentially meant shifting your focus to ANYTHING going on RighT NOW (could be in your body, could be in your surroundings, etc.) I suspect part of what makes both natural beauty and sex (as well as any intense experience) so satisfying and at times mind-altering is the present-time focus they pull us into.
I understand Ram Dass has written a book on contentment, and when asked for an essential nugget from it about how to achieve contentment, he said, "Plumb the depths of the present moment."
So all this seems powerfully effective for stilling the chatter instead of having it run us when we notice to make the shift. And making the shift should become a habit if we do it often enough. But what about "Uninstalling" those junk programs - or at least moving them to a backup disk to be accessed only when we choose? Most of the brain scientists seem to say that's a whole lot harder: We can shift the dominant programs that run, but getting rid of them completely? What's your experience with that?
Nice. What you just described is a problem people noticed thousands of years ago and actually some clever fellas found a solution. There are techniques available that let you be aware of all your programs running in your background and then even uninstall them if you want. It is not easy (no magic pill) and requires dedicated effort for many years, but it is possible and the effects are well worth it. I am talking about yoga. But not the yoga as is known to average person today – physical exercises, but the integrated holistic approach as is described in yoga sutras of patanjali and other texts. The goal of yoga is exactly what you are trying to achieve and the text of yoga sutras is something like user manual how to get there and what situations you can encounter on the journey and how to deal with them. I can recommend some books if you want. Or if you are not willing to immerse yourself into thousands years old discourse, you may look up "mindfulness meditation" technique… it is quite close, but in modern suit.
Happy uninstalling.
Yup urza, Yoga and Mindfulness are absolutely two of the ways towards the required shift in consciousness. Taiji (again, not the one usually practiced) also contains many, if not all, of the elements required — but of course this is difficult to claim for any “system”, since what any individual person has to work at most is different.
One thing the Taoist system does get incredibly right, I think, is the conception of this change as a “Path”. You can’t say “everybody needs to turn right more” as a way of telling people who are all driving different ways to get on the same path — all you can do is keep pointing to the path (and of course it’s hard to see, so it requires as much creativity in the pointing as one can muster) and try to help individuals realize what the difference is between where they are and where the path is.
Thank you!
PD
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