The French philosopher and nobel laureate Jean-Paul Sartre intuited an incredible insight in the early 20th century – our experiences in the world are not our reality. Satre said “the consciousness that says ‘I AM’ is not the consciousness that thinks.” In fact, the consciousness that thinks isn’t reality either, although it is a step closer.

The consciousness that says “I AM” – the one that identifies with a name, body, societal roles, nationality, race, and preferences – is the ego. And the hallmark of the ego is attachment. What does the ego attach to? Anything that can bring us a sense of self-enhancement.

For example, consider anything of value you own. Would you be upset if it were lost or taken from you? Most likely, any of us would. Because we’ve developed an attachment to it. It was “mine”. And now I’ve been violated or cheated or somehow wronged by losing what was mine.

Continue reading →

2:15 am. It was always 2:15 am.

That’s what the clock read each time I woke up in the middle of the night.

For a long while I struggled with insomnia. No matter what time I went to bed, I would wake up wide awake at 2:15 am. There was no external noise or other environmental stimuli causing the disturbance – just my body deciding to wake up at that time.

And unfortunately, I couldn’t fall back asleep. No amount of relaxing music, meditative practices, warm milk, or boring reading worked.

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t stop my thoughts from running. The thoughts weren’t of a particular nature – I had no conscious worry or anxiety – but they were persistent. The more I tried to “quiet my mind” the more frenetic the thoughts became.

Continue reading →

How hard do you work to become good at something? Do you find it challenging to keep yourself motivated? Easily discouraged and quick to give up?

I know the feeling.

For me, if something captured my attention, I wanted to dig right in. But it often didn’t turn out so well.

The first time I held a guitar, I had visions of rockstar celebritydom. How hard could it be – there were only six strings? A few weeks and several blistered fingers later, I gave up. It was just too difficult. The sounds my guitar made didn’t even come close to what I was hearing on the CDs.

In his wonderful Outliers book, Malcolm Gladwell posits the 10,000 hour rule which Continue reading →

For many years I thought the word tinnitus was pronounced like tin-NIGHT-us. It wasn’t until a friend and healthcare worker corrected my misperception and informed me it is actually TIN-nih-tus. But regardless of how the word sounds, people suffering from this disorder experience a continuous ringing or buzzing in their ears.

Imagine such an annoyingly incessant noise “playing” in your ear. It’s extremely frustrating, particularly since there is no easy way to “turn it off”.

Yet have you ever tried to stop the unending stream of thoughts that enter your head? The internal dialogues, judgments, frustrations, goals, hopes, and fears that consume our non-verbal consciousness.

We all suffer from a form of tinnitus of the mind.

Continue reading →

I spent one summer during my high-school years living and working at the beach. It was Ocean City, MD – a wonderful resort town near the northeastern part of Maryland. I got a job working in an arcade, and my two primary responsibilities were to exchange quarters for dollars for the games and to sell cigarettes.

I was good at the former and terrible at the latter. In fact, I was fired because I told each prospective cigarette customer that smoking was bad for their health. My boss said that my job was just to sell tobacco and give coins, not to dispense advice – and especially not to turn away potential revenue. So, I was terminated after a couple weeks on the job.

One of the perks of working in an arcade is unlimited after-hours access to the games – even if it only lasts a few weeks. That was how I learned to beat Dragon’s Lair – the world’s first laserdisc video game. But one of the games I never beat was Whac-A-Mole. It was unbeatable.

Each time you smack down one mole, another one pops up. It never ends. The faster you eliminate one mole, the more quickly new moles appear. It got so frustrating that I stopped playing entirely. Who wants to play a game you can never win?

Continue reading →