Philosophy

Introduction

It was 2020, and the covid plague was upon us. School had let out just after Spring break, and it moved online, but this was a phone-it-in kind of situation, and everbody knew it. Everyone just wanted to end the semester and let the summer give us some breathing room. You might remember how that turned out. With all of this extra time on my hands, I took up leatherwork. At first, I went to Hobby Lobby and purchased a few items, and I learned how to saddle stitch, and so, I would sit on the couch, maybe with some music playing or a video going, and I'd stitch. I stitched so much during that time that I developed this debilitating condition in my thumbs, and I was seriously worried that I had permantently damaged myself, and this led me to purchasing as very expensive sewing machine, but I digress. I was sitting there with all this free time, and I was doing leatherwork, and I was enjoying myself well enough, but I kept having these thoughts, these pesky negative thoughts that told me I was wasting my time on this, that told me it was lame, that told me I should be doing more important things, that told me I was a loser.

I was sitting there just sewing, learning how to make things out of leather, and I kept noticing this thought process, and I named it The Negative Voice. This turned out to be an important moment, the moment I named The Negative Voice, this interior monologue that does nothing but tell me I am a loser. When I was sewing, I'd get into this zen mode, mind all cleared, and I was able to isolate the voice, something I'd never been able to do before. It just came off as a natural thought, a natural attitude, just me. Once I was able to do that, I could then ask if the negative voice was telling me the truth. Was doing leatherwork some sort of loser activity? Was it lame? Was I wasting my time? And across the board I answered, no, these are fine things to do, and I'm not a loser for doing them. The Negative Voice wasn't representing things truthfully.

From there, I would start speaking aloud when I noticed The Negative Voice telling me I was a loser. I'd say someting like, "I just noticed the negative voice. It isn't telling me the truth." The idea was to try to communicate with this process that was running, to try to quiet it down a little. This practice, of giving voice to the rational and conscious process, has turned into an important feature of my philosophy. Then, in Meditations, I was walking on the treadmill and listening to it in audiobook format, and I had this eureka moment when Marcus told his negative voice to "only go away." It's the part of you that makes you worry about everything, that is always holding you under a brutal scrutiny, and it is coming from you!

People are Patterns

In 2017, I was walking through the public library in Dublin, Georgia, and I stopped and picked up a book, and I can't tell you know what book it was, who wrote it, or anything like that. All I can say is that it was a book about science, but aimed at a lay audience. I flipped a few pages and settled on a paragraph, and I read it, and it talked about how the atoms that compose the human body turn over in about a month, meaning, those atoms cycle in and out of you so that in a month they've completely turned over. In the context of what I was going through at the time, namely, I had just gotten divorced and my ex-wife was already shacking up with someone else, and I had my two daughters to raise, and I just felt pretty miserable most of the time. I missed my ex, and it pulled and pulled at me. I wondered, if the atoms of a person turn over so often, what is it about a person that we love? The answer is a pattern. It isn't the stuff. It's the pattern. That pattern gets hard-wired and we come to expect it. When it is gone, the lower layers of the brain go through a period of withdrawal.