Focus On The Mundane 🩴

LIFE ON URTH - Episode 111

The Realm

I’m currently working on a project called The Realm, an interactive website to lay out and play with my personal mythology. It currently consists of six areas, the third of which just got unveiled:

Explore The Theatre Of Perception

A Narrated Documentary

What is the world without you, the observer?

There is probably something, right? A matrix of vibrations, some of which we can measure, describe, and predict. A bubbly reality soup, before a tiny slice of it is read by your senses and instantiated in experience.

How exactly the colorful experience of sipping a warm drink on a cool summer morning arises from the wet mess inside the brain is a complete mystery.

What we do know is that it’s not a direct interface with reality, any more than a documentary about the deep sea is the same as being crushed by pressure hundreds of times that of the atmosphere.

Your perception of the world is essentially that: a narrated documentary.

The Mundane

At first glance, the physical world is the most dominant layer of experience. A navigation mistake can cause anything from a stubbed toe to a lethal car accident.

Even though the physical layer seems to be the source of both good food and unavoidable death, if you pay close attention, matter isn’t what really matters.

Interwoven with your experience of the material world is meaning, impulse, fantasy, and sorrow. The artificial distinction between the objective and subjective is a powerful tool to produce technology, but it’s not the reality of human life.

As with the documentary, while it’s important where the camera is pointed, even more important is what David Attenborough’s intriguing voice tells you about the situation and, of course, the emotional tone set by the soundtrack.

Likewise, your thoughts (inner narration) and feelings (emotional tone) can ruin even the best meal in the world. They also have the power to fill the most painful situations with meaning.

But rather than those extremes, it’s the mundanity of random Tuesdays that life mostly consists of. How we meet and shape the mundane matters because that’s where life takes part, and because it’s our practice ground for occasional bigger challenges.

Constant Contraction

The strategies you nurture every day will be the ones you automatically apply when stress arises.

Practice is the foundation of success for athletes, artists, and doctors alike. The most essential practice for psychological change is training your attention.

The power of your thoughts and emotions depends on how attached you are to them and how deeply you believe in their particular interpretation of the world. The attachment is formed and broken by the quality of attention.

This doesn’t mean that thoughts and emotions can’t be useful, just that your relationship with them determines the quality of life, even more than the material environment.

Much like a muscle, the mind contracts around heavy loads, trying to push away painful occurrences and grasping for joy. But unlike a muscle, it’s not contraction that needs training - our mind does that automatically - but relaxation.

The Courage To Relax

Counterintuitively, deep change doesn’t depend on what we do with challenging thoughts and emotions, but what we stop doing: contracting, avoiding, pushing, pulling, all while being lost in a story.

Relaxing the mind takes courage because it also means letting go, giving up control, and accepting things as they are right now.

This is not to be confused with carelessness or surrender, quite the opposite. It means taking experience in fully, instead of rejecting parts of it. It means taking responsibility for your world, as it currently appears in consciousness.

‘Nothing needs to be changed right now’ - with this realization comes a deep freedom, because the mental landscape opens up. Striving isn’t negated by this acceptance, it’s enabled.

You know how it feels when nothing needs adjustment. Whenever you struggle to be present, remember that feeling. It’s one of the easiest ways into mindfulness.

Muster all your courage and repeat after me:

Everything is okay.
I don’t need to change anything.

✒️ Quote of the Week: “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” -Alan Watts

🎧 Song of the Week: Tony Anderson - Nuit

📖 Article of the Week: How to Debug Your Human Operating System

Now I’d love to hear from you!

Did something in my writing catch your attention?
Was there an idea you found particularly intriguing?
Or is there a question that’s been on your mind related to these topics?

Just reply to this email or write to me at mail@urth.blog 👈

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All the best,

Adrian / Urth

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