Polishing your Mind

There is no better thing to do in your life than to polish your mind.

Meditation gets shoved down our throats everywhere these days, but often without proper context or explanation as to why. I will try to give my angle.

For starters, one can live a hedonistic or an ascetic life. For 99% of people, life ends up somewhere in between those two extremes, but if you examine their life you'll see that one of the two sides will be dominant. This is the famous yoga/tantra split of Hinduism.

If you live a primarily hedonistic lifestyle, what that means is that you'll be chasing whatever you fancy, whether it's food, pleasure, success, control, love.

If you live a primarily ascetic lifestyle, you will be doing the opposite — you will be using all of your desires as a "lever" of sorts in order to forge your discipline, aka you'll be getting your kicks from NOT doing what you want.

I don't think one is better than the other.

But there is, I think, a more concrete goal to be found in this subject area.

Ask yourself this:

Does your day-to-day life make your mind clearer, or cloudier? I argue that a clear mind will always be better than a cloudy one, because it is easier to stumble into unnecessary suffering if your mind is cloudy.

If you live purely hedonistically, you will be chasing some goal, and sooner or later you will become addicted to that chase. It's easy to imagine "classical" hedonists, like drug users or overeaters. But someone who chases security by making inordinate amounts of money is a hedonist too. If you are chasing, then you are a hedonist.

I used to have hedonistic goals. I wanted security, so I started businesses. I wanted company, so I dated women. I wanted to party, so I did "partying". But, unfortunately, at the end of every hedonistic turn in my life I found myself fatter, poorer, and less satisfied than before.

So I tried the other side.

I used to have ascetic goals. I took every single desire of mine and used it to start a "productive habit". I worked out 6 days a week. I ate precisely the same thing every day for months on end. I took cold showers. I challenged myself to face all of my fears. My fear of heights (I hiked), my fear of the stage (I played in a rock band), my fear of failure (entrepreneurship).

And it felt great. I lost 20 kgs, I got into the best shape of my life, and so did my bank account and family life.

So I kept going and going and going until the very thought of discipline disgusted me. So I started down the path of hedonism again.

How did this happen to me? I thought I had it all figured out!

Turns out I was looking at the wrong metric. By the time I hit all my ascetic goals, my mind was as clouded as it had been during my worst hedonistic habits.

Then it occurred to me. The only true resolution is to pursue a clear mind.

Why? It's simple. A clear mind will save you from bad habits, AND will prevent you from over-optimizing towards your "right" goals.

It will help minimize your suffering and maximize your pleasure.

And now I'm sounding like a hedonist again.

How? Meditation is the only way that I know. There are thousands of meditations — find the one that works for you.