After teaching about Buddhism this past week and Nietzsche’s ideas on creativity and greatness, and after watching Limitless last night, the following thoughts came to me.

In the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes:

How does one become stronger?— By coming to decisions slowly; and by clinging tenaciously to what one has decided. Everything else follows.
The sudden and the changeable: the two species of weakness. (Section 918)

In Limitless, a creatively blocked writer takes a drug that allows him to utilize his brain more completely and efficiently. Part of that involves an intense ability to focus and make connections.

In mindfulness meditation—for example, where your attention is on your breath—it becomes clear how true it is that we naturally have “monkey mind.” Monkey mind is when one thought or idea leads to another, often only tangentially connected, thought or idea. For example, you have a pain in your lower back that reminds you of how uncomfortable your chair is at work, which makes you think of the project that’s due next Wednesday, which makes you think of the doctor’s appointment Wednesday, which makes you think of your sick uncle, which makes you think of that time he took you to the amusement park, which makes you think….

Monkey mind also happens off the meditation cushion, of course. A kind of abbreviated form of it happens quite often during our waking hours. Spontaneously arising ideas and the recognition of possibilities occur as you are moving through the house, the internet, the chapter you’re reading. You notice the bag of chips in the pantry as you walk through the kitchen, you see the link to a Cracked.com article, you’re reading and come across a remark about Japanese art. Naturally the thought of eating chips, reading the Cracked.com article, finding that book on Japanese aesthetics on your bookshelf comes to mind with accompanying desires.

Often we don’t even recognize this process. We happen to notice the bag of chips and given our value of pleasure and our memory of how good those things taste, we grab a couple of chips or the whole bag, as if this was what we intended to do all along. Given how good the mind is at rationalizing, i.e., pulling apparently good reasons for our actions out of the ether, we take ourselves to be in charge and in control of our actions, not the passengers of random desire that we often are. David McRaney in You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself does an excellent job of explaining the various ways we rationalize our decisions.

After eating the bag of chips or after an hour of reading Cracked.com article after article and not writing our own article for publication, for school, for the boss, we may wonder what the hell we were thinking and promise not to be so frivolous with our actions and time. But we quickly forget these moments and proceed to repeat this pattern shortly thereafter, but now it’s because we noticed the broom and suddenly thought it a good idea to sweep the garage instead of taking out the trash as we had planned.

One way out of this, or at least one way to mitigate it, is by practicing mindfulness meditation. When sitting to watch the breath, the mind wonders: the monkey is loose. It’s our job to non-judgmentally acknowledge that the mind wandered, let go of the object to which it wandered, and bring our attention back to the breath. This gets repeated, when we notice it’s happened (and it’s surprising how long it takes to notice sometimes), over and over and over again. This is an intense practice of noticing monkey mind, noticing the thoughtless pursuit of whatever comes before consciousness, and letting go of it, returning our attention to the breath.

This can be carried over to our lives off the cushion. We begin to notice all these random ideas and desires that pop up for what they are. We thereby drive a wedge between their occurrence and our rationalizing them into action/being.

Once we get good at this, the hard part becomes being able to sort them into the one’s that are worthy of attention and the one’s that should quickly be let go. This is difficult because of how good the mind is at rationalizing. One thing we might do to help fight this is to familiarize ourselves with the ways in which we are self-deluding.

Perhaps one way to follow Nietzche’s thought—“How does one become stronger?— By coming to decisions slowly; and by clinging tenaciously to what one has decided. Everything else follows.”—would be to get better at letting go of all that arises by practicing mindfulness meditation and then to keep some kind of list where we jot down ideas that might be worth pursuing, but that we’ll take up later because, right now, we’re clinging tenaciously to what we had slowly decided to do.