🗞️ TSAR: Meditation, Head Evasion

Good Morning ⛅

Welcome to the fifth edition of The Sunday Andrew Review ("TSAR"), our Sunday newsletter. They come out on, well, Sundays. What's the point? Choose one topic and go a bit deeper. I hope you like it. Suppose you don't? Well then, good, that's settled.

In classic AA🍎 fashion, this should still only take a few min to read.

On with the show...

Meditation, Head Evasion

Meditation - in the way that most people today "practice" it - is nonsense. Sitting there functionally asleep for 30-60 mins helps no one, unless you really know how to meditate. if you're reading this, that's not you lol. Movement is way better medicine and the only reason skilled meditators can benefit from a meditation practice in the first place is because, even though they are still, the spirit is moving. That takes years of practice. Years better spent running into things and getting hurt. Yanking out the cables of pain, heartbreak, and vanity to reveal the small dude behind the mask.

I've noticed that for normies, meditation is but one arrow in a whole quiver of modern activities that are more about evasion than attack. Peace? I can buy that in a vending machine. Stillness? One guided audio meditation away. Joy? An e-cig rip before a simple scroll on the twitter feed.

Here are the other arrows that allow us the evade our own heads:

• Drowning in a vat of self-analysis. Why did I do that? Why did s/he do that? Lol friends, you will never know. That's a conversation between two parties that you are not privy to. Way better to get off the meditation pillow and go outside. Nature and its inhabitants await your arrival.

• Hiding. The pandemic for too many people was a hall pass to turn their living room into their LIVING room. Somebody once told me to turn the world into your living room. Never forgot that.

• Always finding another shoulder to cry on. Talented yogis will teach you that your knees fit into your armpits and your palms fit into your elbows like a ball in a mitt. In the same way, your face best fits on your own shoulder. Sometimes reaching for the phone or a book is ok, but in the end are inferior substitutes.

• "Science" knows best. Science is conducted by scientists, mere mortals with their own set of incentives. Your body knows best, every time. How your body reacts to any kind of medicine is a million times more telling than "what the study said".

• Taking your time. Sitting in traffic, waiting in never-ending queues, meditating in lotus pose... these types of 'activities' are being spun as unequivocal positives. They're not. Something about speed - going fast and understanding the consequences of doing so - has been swiftly retired in American culture. I remain unconvinced that this is a good thing.

• Concealing your intentions. I think this all kicked off with Robert Greene's 1998 Machiavellian book called 48 Laws of Power. Read voraciously and mindlessly by every VC and entrepreneur type to "take over the world" lol. Btw it's still selling like hot cakes. Basically, pay games and play them well and you shall triumph. Dude, what about good ole fashioned honesty? Wearing your heart and your mind on your sleeve? Every human relationship is built on trust so how can you build trust by playing these disturbing, antisocial games to "get an edge"? My father taught me this, a man who built his business on basic trust (Whatever happens, I know this guy is not going to fuck me over). Still wild that we think games work. The most compelling supervillains and heroes tell you what they think straight to your face, and it feels so unusual and shocking that we think... they must be playing games. The brainwashing needs a wash-out.

• Listening to everyone but yourself. The ugly part of our hyperconnected world is that instead of 20 voices to take notes from, you have 20,000 or more. What a great way to feel guilty whenever you go against the grain on anything! You have the peanut gallery - armed with venomous words and boxes of popcorn - to laugh in your face mwahahahahaha. Listening to yourself is not traitor behavior.

• Drugs and alcohol are but life enhancers. They certainly can be and have been used for millennia to deepen relationships, get out of your noisy head for a few hours, and let the guard down. All good in moderation, no doubt. But let's be real: the ugly side of these substances is that there's a reason the use of them SKYROCKET after sunset. During the day, you're busy working, the sun is out, surfing that caffeine wave, etc. But 5pm cruises around and all the stuff you don't want to feel surfaces - this is by and large why many drink like fish. Don't quit drinking and pledge your life to a monastery, but understand this core motivation.

• 'Self-care' is paramount. Well, it depends on how you define self-care. If it's what I'm seeing on Instagram, keep looking gang. Turning your life into a reality show / spa treatment center is not self-care. That's just vanity - a self-fabricated spa. We have conflated the work with the spa... lol no. The work is the work. The spa is the spa. They don't share walls.

• All we have is the present and the future. This is something people with unplumbed pasts say. The future is fairy dust. The present is redefining the past. And to ignore the past is to deny reality and to deny reality is to dwell in delusion. Whatever stories are told of the future are, as a practical matter, lies - sheer intellectual entertainment. As the author, he can always rewrite the script but he has no idea what the studio will want in even 12 months.

These are all examples of evasion. What's the opposite of evasion? Confrontation. After a ubiquitous implementation of screens, quarantines, and nonsensical "self-care" practices, the confrontation piece has gone missing. It may be time to pick up the pieces and thumb them back into place.

LMK what you think and I'll see you Monday.

Have a super Sunday.

Andrew🍎

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