Categories
Happiness Ideas

The pre-orgasmic meditator

A long time ago I read about how to refer to a woman who hadn’t experienced an orgasm. She wasn’t “non-orgasmic,”  she was merely  “pre-orgasmic.”

The implication being that the pre-orgasmic woman can, at some point, have one through practice and the right setting.

Sex and meditation are different, but are there any overlaps? Through meditation some people experience heightened sensory states while others just experience an awareness of their thoughts and feelings. So I starting wondering if the second group of meditators might be thought of as meditative version of a pre-orgasmic woman? Maybe with enough time and practice will the big wow, altered states happen?

In meditation, I don’t know if the euphoric sensations are vital, because reaching beneficial altered traits is lasting and more important the temporary altered states.

If a pre-orgasmic woman never had an orgasm before she died but she actually enjoyed sex and felt bonded with her partner, would she have had an unfulfilled life? What’s more important, headlines or trend lines?

Meditation is more often underwhelming because, for me, it’s mostly a sub-perceptual result, but one that accumulates.

You’ll rarely know what states a meditator reaches because the outcome is  internal and personal.

Over the past 2,500 years, Buddhists and others have charted many common mile markers for the inner lives of meditators. But the only real way to verify these altered states and traits is by monitoring a meditator’s brainwaves in a lab.

I don’t know what Steve Jobs level of meditative attainment was, but he said this, “If you just sit and observe, you’ll see how restless your mind is… over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things – that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.”

Categories
Mexico

Ants with a young gecko

Most houses in our part of Mexico have resident gecko lizards. They come out at night to hunt insects and sometimes make distinctive, loud chirps, I guess to each other.

One morning I found a dead gecko in the kitchen. It was young, about as long as your pinky finger. He’d gotten caught by the refrigerator door gasket, squished but not deformed. I placed him on the edge of a raised garden bed in the backyard thinking a bird might eat him.

Later that day to my surprise, I saw the gecko moving up a wall about ten feet away from where I’d set him down. As got closer I could see the gecko was still dead but was be dragged up the wall by a band of around 40 small ants.

It was slow but noticeable progress up the wall. Until it wasn’t… three feet upward then a progress would halt for some unseen reason and the gecko would descend quite a bit.

It was fascinating to watch and there didn’t seem to be any logic or plan. I checked in on thievery couple of hours as it went on into the night and the gecko was slowly moved toward the top of a 12 foot wall.

Maybe ant reinforcements came in from time to time, though I didn’t count the workers, the number of ants seemed to stay constant.

I don’t know where their nest is but I’m sure the feast arrived eventually. Poco a poco, little by little.

Categories
Happiness Ideas

Our economy and our culture

Someone once said, “The task isn’t so much to see what no one has seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, concerning that which everybody sees.”

Think about this, you could do Richard Branson’s job, most of the time. Most of the time he’s just doing stuff most people could do at work.

His real job is seeing new opportunities, making good decisions, and understanding connections between his audience, his brand, and his ventures.

You could do Warren Buffett’s job, most of the time. Most of the time he’s just reading in his modest office in Omaha. He doesn’t take a lot of meetings or micro-manage his managers.

Once in a while though, he pushes a huge pile of chips across the table  making mostly successful investments in opportunities he sees.

You could do Dave Chappelle’s job, most of the time. Most of the time he’s hanging out in Ohio observing life.

But now and then, he walks out on a stage in front of hundreds of people and has to be funny.

How many more of these folks are out there but haven’t been able to realize there potential because of racism, sexism, and disproportional wealth distribution? Unfortunately, creativity is more broadly distributed than the opportunity to put it to use.

What’s great about this country is that America became the place where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. A Coke is a Coke. You can’t get you a better Coke, all Cokes are the same. Beyonce knows it, the President knows it, the bum on the corner knows it, and you know it.

But what are the tapeworms of the American system? What’s stifling economic competitiveness and impeding a better sense of  American well-being? Workers struggling to make ends meet are a drag on the economy is one. So are opportunities to advance missed because you’re the wrong color, sex, or you’re too poor.

I just saw Dave Chappelle in a routine talking about the problem in the spotlight now – men abusing their power over women (and girls). Dave pointed out that the real problem is systemic not necessarily just bad people.

One point Dave made was, what about rewarding people who come forward to report a wrong or take a stance against something wrong instead of often punishing them? Not everyone has the fortitude or status to come forward, but if more people did and were rewarded for it, the problems wouldn’t be able to fester and hurt more people.

One example Dave gave was how a new South Africa tried to resolve the problem of apartheid by having folks from both sides of the old system come forward and recount their stories. The aim was showing that the system was deeply flawed and the people in it were acting in ways that were promoted by that system.

It comes down to this, if you knew everything about a system and you’d be willing to join in a random place then it’s a fair system. I know it’s not realistic to think 300 and something million hairless monkeys can create a system that fair, but we can do better. Action expresses priorities.