Freedom, Reality and More Philosophy...
The Introverted Thinker Newsletter #018
Hello everyone,
This week’s edition takes a look at a piece I wrote on meditation. Something I use to create a life I want to live. Sounds too good to be true, but give it a read.
Thank you.
Alter Your Reality by Cultivating These Two Meditative Mindsets
“All that matters is how you feel about yourself” — words from a wise friend.
If I look at my life historically and take a deep dive analysis into what made the highs in my life so high, it all comes down to a single thing. The foundation of it all, the building blocks to my happiness.
And what is this you may be thinking?
Introspective reflection. Essentially I can boil these reflective exercises to two things: meditation and visualization.
Whenever I go through long periods of losing these habits, I end up throwing myself down loops of self-destructive overthinking.
There are many variations within these types of practice. There's spiritual, religious, psychedelic meditation, and the list goes on. But for me, meditation isn't just sitting down and breathing, it’s much more.
It stems from the thoughts and feelings we experience in everyday reality, manifesting themselves in your daily life. This can be done in a session of breathing meditation, visualization, or simply writing things into existence.
Let me now show you the two foundational mindsets to try and develop that will change every single way you feel about yourself and more.
Wishing Good Upon Your ‘Enemies’
From what I’ve personally experienced, the spiritual world, or whatever you want to call it works in a very simplistic fashion. You get out what you put in. However simplistic this idea is, it may be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everything will be smooth sailing.
“Just think positive, and nothing can go wrong”
You are very wrong my friend. This is a rollercoaster of lunacy we are currently living in. Society has warped our morals and deconstructed our primal ideals to breed weakness of the soul. Modern society is weak, and it all stems from the world being a breeding ground for comfort. Self-reliance is losing its central position.
Envy, jealousy, spite, and hatred. We’ve all felt these things towards people. And we’ve all seen these things drag us down. For the better part of the last six months, I was living in a hateful state of envy and spite towards a person that let me down in my life.
Do you know what this did to me? I lost the ability to write. The one creative pursuit that meant everything to me, the spark was just gone. I didn't write anything for 6 months.
Envy blocks creativity.
I suppressed my talents by wishing bad upon those that hurt me. I was so preoccupied with hoping that other people's lives sucked that I drove my own life down the pothole.
There's only one thing you can start doing here. It’s sending love. Send people vibrations of love. In your meditations, just focus on transmuting rays of love and happiness to people you once hated. This invigorates you, it picks your life state back up. And by doing so, you attract the positivity that you once lost.
The First Book of 2022 - Freedom by Sebastian Junger
Starting 2022 on a theme close to my heart, freedom! It isn’t coincidental that the first book I read this year was about freedom. Because this year is the year I want to achieve the full freedom I desire within my work.
Junger is an American wartime journalist and I would class him as one of my top idols in terms of writing genres and styles. When I go to write my first book it will be inspired by how Jungers books are.
This book is about Junger and his friend’s journey walking across the railroads of the East Coast of America, as he weaves in stories and anecdotes from history. A long, long walk where they each are disassociating from the reality of their lives at home. Men being men.
“We walked around four hundred miles and most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them… One night we were cooking dinner and a freight train thundered by with so much noise and power that I tossed out what I thought was an unanswerable question: What would it take to stop something like that instantaneously? I imagined some kind of massive wall, but the answer was more obvious: another train going just as fast the opposite way. America could seem like that as well, a country moving so fast and with so much weight that only a head-on collision with itself could stop it.”
4/5 stars I rate it.
A Philosophical Thought - “Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition”
Whilst this statement has become somewhat of a meme in the Reddit subculture today, I think if we look at the root of what it’s trying to say it sparks an interesting conversation.
Is the idealization of the past and its simple, unclustered values a way to move forward? Or should we really try to emulate a time where people were happier?
There is no denying modernity is a mess, with skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide across the population even in kids as young as 7 years old.
Was the past perfect in comparison to what we have today? I know my stance. Modernity is moving away from how we should be living; in touch with nature without a million notifications and a million streams of information shooting into our fragile brains.
What do you think?
Thanks for reading, it means a lot.
I hope you smash your next week. See you soon
Julian.
Couldn’t agree more with what you’ve written. Hate never brings happiness