There’s an important discipline involved in avoiding a constipated mind… and most of us are failing.
Haven’t you forgotten something?
Are you sure? Are you sure there isn’t something important that you’ve filed away for later? That important thing that’s now sitting on the bench by the phone beneath a bunch of other things?
Isn’t it stuck somewhere in your mental landscape like a bindi in your foot? Doesn’t the free-flow of your thoughts stub its toe again and again on that thing, that you’re not really sure what it is anymore, but by the weight of it you’re sure it’s important.
Sounds like you’ve got a constipated head.
You need Uncle Jon’s patented mental prune juice. ‘Put the flow back in your life.’
I don’t know if it’s just me, but sometimes I’m just begging for a mental enema. There’s just so much going on in my head. Thoughts weigh nothing but carrying them all around makes physically exhausted.
I’m crunching the numbers on this or that deal, I’m running a business, I’m staying on top of current affairs, I’m preparing blogs, I’m managing complex social relationships (No, that dress is very slimming), I’m preparing witty put-downs for my friend who goes for Collingwood.
*Flush.
I wish. Modern life is hard like that. Our brains were never meant to carry and process so much information. The human species is in desperate need of a hardware upgrade.
But then we go out and we stuff ourselves til we’re sick in the head with information.
Facebook, for example, is an all-you-can-eat sushi-train – the information just keeps coming at you. You don’t have to do a thing…
Nom nom nom.
And I really feel the bind of it in times like these. I mean I’m trying to keep on top of what Donald Trump is up to, but it all moves so fast. I don’t know whether to be gruntled or terrified.
And it’s tempting to say, just switch off and don’t worry about it. But I think we all feel the truth in the saying that “bad things happen when good people do nothing.”
So is there something I should be doing? I should figure out what’s happening in the world – not the truth that the media tells you is the truth; not the alternative truth that looks like the truth but is actually a phony truth used to distract you from the real truth; not the truth peddled by crazy men on computers who hear voices in their heads – no, the real truth. I should figure out what that is somehow and do something about it.
But it’s a bit hard so I’ll just pop that thought here under the phone bill and the rego papers.
After a while, it all becomes a burden. It gets heavy. I don’t want to carry it around. I don’t want new information. I don’t want new stimulus. I want to close down, shut off, curl up on a couch somewhere and eat cookies.
(Is this actually what they want?)
A lot of people turn to drugs and alcohol as a release. But it’s a false solution. You forget for a while. Maybe you blackout. But you still carry it in your head somewhere.
Drinking to clear your mind is like drinking to cure the pain of having eaten too much.
And this is what it feels like to me. The brain is another digestive organ. Whatever you feed your brain it needs to digest – it needs to process it and work it out.
And when it comes to the brain, just like the stomach, you need to watch what you eat.
Now some people might say, ‘Not me Jon. I can watch 5 episodes of My Kitchen Rules a night and it doesn’t affect me.’
And that might be true. It might be the case for some people that their brains have given up trying to process the information they’re given. They just let everything go through to the keeper / colon.
It’s not digesting so it never feels full.
But a brain that isn’t digesting is a brain that is not drawing any nourishment. It’s not learning, growing, becoming wiser or, in my case, more cunning.
Do you really want that?
But the price of having a curious mind seems to be that we can often end up stuffed. We become bloated, slow and dull if we’re not careful. Maybe farting out some of the unpleansantness from time to time.
(I try to keep brain farts out of the blog, but better an empty house than a nasty tenant, as my uncle used to say.)
So it seems the there are two disciplines we need to develop if we’re going to walk lightly in a world of dense information streams.
The first is obviously getting disciplined with what we consume – in exactly the same way that any weight-loss strategy involves getting disciplined not just with the quality but also the quantity of food we eat.
And that means it’s not enough to say that I only get my news from quality publications like Buzzfeed, if you’re binging out on them every night.
The second discipline is finding ways to regularly flush the mind. In a way these blogs are a blessing because I’m regularly working through my thoughts on this or that topic.
But you don’t have to start your own blog (though Ron, you’re probably due). It could be chewing the fat with a friend, or even some private journal practice.
You’ve just got to keep the stimulation moving. You can’t just eat the news of some fresh horror in the middle east and not let it move through you in some way. Even if that’s just to comment. “OMG. How horrible.”
Don’t let yourself get blocked up.
(There’s probably some role for meditation here too but that’s not my bag, so if someone’s got insight into that I’d be happy to hear it.)
But the goal here is to move lightly in the world, and to keep our minds fresh, nimble and curious.
Unfortunately, It won’t happen on its own.
How do you keep your mind flowing and regular?
Andrew Hellicar says
Ok, I read these all the time, love them, but never comment. Have to comment now. The writing down/Getting Things Done (GTD) approach for “open-loops” works well enough for me. However I ended out shutting down the Trump inputs though. Usually cognitive dissonance occurs when you take inputs from differing sources. Now it seems a single source creates paradoxes and cognitive dissonance… too much tension and discomfort for me so shutdown input. Thankfully the work I do is nourishment enough for the brain.
KiwiAl says
Jon, yo talkin shi-it maan!
Actually, I have the same problem. Most of us do.
Apply the first rule of computing (since the brain is just an awesome computer):
Garbage In, Garbage Out… Don’t let the garbage flow in.
Step 1: Get rid of the TV. What’s on it worth seeing? You can get it off the ‘net, if it’s worth getting.
Step 2: Don’t bother READING newspapers. It’s another waste of time. Makes you stupid and brainwashed. Read the main headlines if you must. Reject most of it.
Step 3: Use otherwise underutilised time – so, when stuck in traffic, listen to radio news or talk-back. Or listen to Classical Music, which is well known for cleansing the mind.
Step 4: Be disciplined about surfing the net. Don’t spend too much time (read zero) on click-bait. At the end of the day, WGAS? Likewise, how much time is Social Media worth? SFA. WGAS, next week?
At the end of the day, what can most of us do about the world news anyway? SFA. So, who really needs it? The Media, as a means to take your money. But it don’t make many people happy, so why bother?
Appreciate what you have, a partner, family, clean air, good food. Sorry, I know you Aussies are running out of water…
Following my own rules, I’m gonna spend less time here!
Later, gater.
ron goddard says
‘cognitive dissonance’, ‘willful blindness’ and ‘normalcy bias’. three headings, one meaning. mental inertia. following the herd, don’t like change, believe in government, gulp down the evening news and generally suffer from mutated consciousness. hate russia, love america.
jonno, if you come across a rather large sergeant ants’ nest and poke it and prod it constantly you are a gonna get some angry ants. they will run all over the place to trace this extreme source of annoyance. if you kill many of them they will even retaliate. translate to syria and the prodder : the us of a. the americans have been prodding ants nests for quite a while now and we now have a flood of refugees to all points of the compass causing massive upheavals wherever they go to.(mostly fit, aggressive young islamic pricks). buzzfeed..another prolific prodder with a rather nasty dislike trump. they have been exposed like other outlets as being fakers of the truth. cnn journos have been told to stay away from the white house. a former employee of cnn to israel/palistine (2012 i think) tells a rather nasty tale of her and her 5 other journos, experiences at the hands of her ‘minders’: american marines with black frogshoods(?), so they cannot be recognised, forcibly directing them to tell fake stories. thrown to the ground and beaten then interrogated by the c.i.a. and told to write what the c.i.a. wanted. nice americans. 31 countries invaded and over 20 million murdered. i recently read an interview of a former four star u.s.a. general about the ‘middle east’ conflicts back to 1990. it was staggering. he admitted that it was nasty but, in america’s eyes ok. they wanted the oil and drugs and the military were there to ‘protect’ their interests. including australia and british troops.
mental cleanliness. kiwial says gigo. he is right. in kiwi land their are many ‘boltholes’. boltholes purchased by the american elite in case usa is too hot for them in the event of a war, which they themselves create. nice people. the world as created is a rather nice place. we could have harmony and cooperation, except for one thing. humanity. greedy, power hungry, ego driven homo sapiens.
now we have psycothpath(hillary clinton) still beating the wardrum. her military advisers say no hillary..it will last three days and we will be slaughtered. but h.c. says no we CAN beat them(the russians) dear h.c. a massive delusional. but she is near death so what does she care?
how do i keep my mind flowing and regular? i stay away from junk. but is bloody hardwork.
cheers ron
p.s. its my birthday on tuesday (7th feb., every year like clockwork lol)
eddy says
Ron,
I wish you a wonderful birthday on 7th of February. Thank you for your comments which are full of “gem”.
Also thanks to Jon and KiwiAl.
Ron, please check this youtube documentary on a recently killed journalist:
http://yournewswire.com/german-newspaper-editor-exposed-cia-dead/
ron goddard says
that four star general is wesley clark, supreme allied commander of NATO during the 1999 war in yugoslavia. america, ‘peacekeeper’ has over 800 military bases around the globe. russia has about 3/5 of 5/8 of f. all!! who is the aggressor here? pres. of philipines has told the yanks to piss off, as the yanks are bringing in tons and tons of military hardware for action against the chinese. pres. has told the yanks : take it away and don’t come back. trump has recently brokered a peace treaty between russia and japan dating back to ww11. you see, the soviets(our allies in ww11) were not invited to the signings of peace agreements at the end of ww11. the yanks took all of the credit. movies, songs b.s., more b.s. now trump has acknowledged the ‘wrong’ done then and is now being nominated for the nobel peace award, much to the annoyance of the pope. pope frances alias son of the worst nazi war criminal of ww11 and himself a murderer extroardinaire Pope you say?. remember pope innocent 111? he had a whole south of france christian communuty exterminated, because they wouldn’t turn catholi, so nothing has changed. pope frances is now the new leader of nwo.
KatM says
We should be grateful that we live in an information age with unprecedented access to multimedia sources. Truth is becoming more precious than ever as one tries to distill facts and wisdom from all the advertising noise, opinion and profanity. Twitter is one outlet for farts; buttbook is the other. Find out the reason why these companies exist and whether or not you wish to contribute to the excrement.
God bless you Jon! We’re still a lucky country as long as we have the ABC…
steve christo says
This is one of the reasons why i took up scuba diving … for 45-60 minutes i’m underwater in the world of big fish and little fish … no mobile phones, no emails, no door knocking bible bashers, no invoices, no rego, no taxes, noone talking to me, noone screaming lyrics at me, no talk back brainwashing radio… just me and fish. I truly need my detox time even though I don’t read the papers or watch tv and haven’t done so since Dymphna started one of her 3 days courses back in 2014 by screeching “throw your tv out the window if you wanna be successful” … love your work Jon … always thought provoking instead of mind numbing.
Ron … P.S. – war in Croatia was 91-95 … there wasn’t much happening in Yugoslavia but I agree with your comments about the generals.
David Hancock says
Is this THE Steve Christo?………Just love this mans columns…even if I don’t have the need to be a real rich bastard!
steve christo says
Not sure if I’m THE steve christo but it’s my business name here in australia …. i’m a wog boy and nobody has been able to spell my fathers name let alone pronounce it. Is there a famous Steve Christo?
David Hancock says
Sorry Steve….I have a mate of the same name who worked as a sports photographer….a very good one…..but that is the digital world…I’ve got several namesakes around the planet…the latest I discovered is a writer in the UK who writes books about walking trips to country pubs………that really made me feel as though I had missed my vocation……
steve christo says
Cheers David.
ron goddard says
thank you steve. if it was 1991-95. just shows we oz s are more correct than those american varmints. look, americans are very innovative, god ‘fearing'(curse the word..why not god loving?) people you will find in a day’s march. very patriotic and have come up with some zinger films and songs(and singers to sing them). they have lead the world in high tech things like tv s, etc(which dymphna want us to throw out the window so we can’t watch eddie maguires mob get done by the st. alburn choirs team in the ‘f’ grade amateurs. getting back to the question of clearing your mind etc. the ‘mind’ IS the most powerful force in the universe. i’ve made up my mind..forget the facts. i’ve changed my mind..i am going to mum’s place for the night. its all about the mind. and mindsets. belief systems. so jonno a very thought provoking article. are you sure you haven’t got a ‘ghost writer’ or a private ‘think tank’? cheers, ron
ronald goddard says
final word lol. go to ‘GlobalResearch.org’ and read about gen. clark. at the end there is a series of related articles. look at Global Warfare:Militarization of Russia’s doorstep, is US NATO going to attack russia or iran? both gen clark and a fellow named prof. michel chossudovsky are interviewed in the separate articles and are, i think, believable. each article gives one an invaluable insight into the mechanics of diplomacy, fake wars(wars that are planned) and disbursement of peoples and restructuring of national boundaries to suit the curriculum : oil and drugs. its quite..hmm disgusting/or is it informative? there are other equally good articles to read also. why do we feel so safe here in oz?