Do dead ends count as exploration?

Hawking is one of my heroes. His books for the lay are fascinating and latterly very well written.

Bruce Hammonds prompted me to explore ‘the explorer’ in the learner. What struck me about exploring, whether terrestrially or theoretically, was the need for curiosity to execute that activity.

Funny that Barbara should mention ‘generic curiosity’. As you say Christine, parallel conversations. But maybe not so funny after all. My argument is that curiosity and learning are complementary – that explorers seek to learn about new things, new places and new ideas. But for them to do this requires more than just the ability to learn.

Catchya later

My husband also pointed to one of his heroes Stephen Hawking who is able to explorer the far reaches of thought and theoretical boundaries without the ability to fully move his physical body and has limited mobility in physical space. Very much still an explorer, no?

If you are actively doing/moving ahead there is less time for reflection/hesitation and less need for explanation. All you really need to do exploring is external focus — could be specific eg “what’s at the top of that hill?” or could be a more generic curiosity of “what happens next?” — plus a means of moving onward.

This may be totally not what you had in mind. Oh well.

I’m not so sure about being OK with sitting in the unknown – that’s not my vision of explorers.

Rather they are not OK with just sitting, whether it’s the unknown or the known.

It’s the restlessness in sitting that takes the explorer into the unknown which, of course, becomes known and they move on.

Catchya

You’ve captured the essence of mindfulness practice and what makes it lifelong and a practice!

I will be forever grateful to Thich Nhat Hanh for transforming my relationship with doing the dishes. Life is better when the simple day to day tasks become part of the the spiritual practice rather than something to dread.

To my mind, explorers are people who are footloose with a mission. They are not often content. But then, that’s what makes them explorers. Neither do they experience fun all the time, but they know how to enjoy it.

Two complimentary proverbs spring to mind about explorers:

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
- André Gide

Ten years’ searching in the deep forest.
Today great laughter at the edge of the lake.
- Soen Nakagawa

Catchya later
from Middle-earth

Monkey-mind runs all the time. So long as we find our identity in it, we’re its prisoner. Mindfulness practices, among them meditation, help us find the calm self underneath all that thinking noise.

You might be interested in a psychedelic experience I had in my twenties that illustrates the predicament perfectly. I had been reading Aldous Huxley, and I was experimenting with mescaline. When the drug peaked, I became super-conscious of my thoughts and how they cascaded from one to the next, continuously and urgently. I felt it would be fun to see if I could slow them down and stop them. So I started watching them go by, trying not to get caught up in each one. They started to come slower, and at some point I realized I was holding just one. If I could let it go, I would have peace. But I feared letting go of that “last” thought because then I might die.

Drugs made this more vivid, but I think that’s where we all are. It’s the predicament you asked about. It’s hard to let go because we’re afraid we’ll be annihilated. Kind of woo-woo but I think it’s true. Mindfulness practice gives us the experience of thought-free peace that dispels the illusion that we are our mind.

In my story, that distressing thought about my death was so frightening to me that my mind was off and running again for a few minutes with a fireworks display of new thoughts. I settled down and tried several more times to stop the last thought but didn’t succeed. I’ve since learned that meditation is about *letting* thoughts stop not *making* them stop. It takes a lot of relaxed, non-judgmental practice, and it all makes a lot more sense to me now.

If you’re interested in being inspired and learning more about mindfulness, I would recommend any books by Thich Nhat Hanh. He’s a Zen master whose speaks a lot and does radio interviews. His work is profound and yet very approachable, like that of Deepak Chopra or the Dalai Lama.