Eric Tian

Nobody likes being wrong. Though mistakes are a potent tool for learning, incorrect decisions often have consequences, ranging from the practical (paying a fine) to the deeply psychological (questioning one’s self-worth). These factors do not make for a fun experience. As Martina Navratilova remarked, Whoever said, “It’s not whether you win or lose that counts”, probably lost.

As a result, we analyse. If we begin a new activity – say running, or learning how to code – we invest time to research the topic, consider other’s opinions and form our own conclusions. We only take action when we feel like we know what we are doing.

Yet while this seems natural, there are two issues with this.

First, the world we live in is filled with so much information that trying to understand everything is a daunting task. It can be easy to end up in an endless spiral of opinions – helped no less helped by the addictive nature of social media – with no clear answer at the end.

Secondly, and this sounds obvious, analysis inhibits action. If you’re considering getting a Garmin watch vs. an Apple watch for exercise, you’re not exercising. If you’re reading reviews on what the best course is to learn Java, you’re not coding.

As a result, we end up with an analysis paralysis where a fear of failure inhibits action. In some cases, this paralysis becomes so bad that the actual task at hand never begins and we are frozen in this endless feedback loop of considerations.

What is the antidote to this? I’m no expert, but here’s a suggestion:

Just start.

One of my biggest realisations this year is that action leads to motivation, not the other way around. It’s easy to think that we must be first ready enough to start something before we can have a good go at it. But honestly, I’ve found time and time again that if you just start, you’ll find that you’re already ready.

This idea can be scary. It requires discipline and often requires one to deal with failure an uncomfortable amount of times. But the great thing about taking a little step is that:

1. We still learn, as experience is a great teacher; and
2. This small step creates momentum for more steps in the future.

Of course, this idea can’t be applied to all domains. Some areas, like investing in a property or choosing a career path, require a certain amount of consideration so one won’t regret the decision later on. Yet, in most cases it doesn’t really matter in which direction you move, just so long as you move. It all starts with that first step.

Last night, I had a really weird dream. I’m usually pretty good at recalling dreams but for whatever reason, this one was more vivid than most.

In the dream, technology had evolved to a point where virtual reality games were good. Like, Ready Player One or The Three Body Problem good. To a point where games were practically indistinguishable from reality.

I found myself in one of those games. I was a virtual self, moving around artificially, but there was also my dreaming self who was controlling my virtual self, in an entirely different world. In other words, I was controlling:

• Character 1: My virtual-self
• Character 2: My dreaming-self

In the virtual game, I found myself in a dungeon. There was one other player with me – a dark-skinned, male avatar with white hair – and we were lost trying to find an exit. I remember randomly looking around the dungeon to find some sort of clue – a key, map or puzzle – but found nothing.

But then I realised I was dreaming and I entered into lucid dreaming. Now this was really trippy, because now there was:

• Character 1: My virtual-self
• Character 2: My dreaming-self
• Character 3: My lucid-self (dreaming)

Since I now had control over my environment as a lucid dreamer, I decided that I had enough of this dungeon and teleported myself to grab some bubble-tea. Which is weird, because I normally don’t drink bubble-tea (bit too sweet). But anyway, I ended up at a small, indoor, run-down bubble-tea joint that had carpet and no chairs.

Now this is where it gets really weird. This bubble-tea scene was for my virtual-self (character 1) in the game. But simultaneously, I also lucid dreamed my dreaming-self (character 2) at a different bubble-tea store. So, I was living two bubble-tea experiences at the same time, at different joints. We ordered different bubble-teas and when they came, I drank them at the same time, from two different places. And it’s impossible to describe, because it’s like your consciousness (ignoring the metaphysical considerations here) has been split in two and you’re experiencing two opposing sensations at the same time. Something simultaneously having a hot bath + a cold shower.

As the lucid-self, my field of vision constantly shifted between my dreaming-self and the virtual-self. As my virtual-self, I would be sitting on the carpet drinking my bubble-tea, then the next second I’m in my dreaming-self running down the street away from some robbers. Then I’d switch back to my virtual-self and be somewhere else entirely, then switch back to my dreaming-self, where I would be on a random mountain, still being pursued by robbers, for an unknown reason. It was extremely disorienting and frankly, terrifying.

When I woke up, my head was spinning. I felt my consciousness had been split into two and was now in one piece again. This honestly felt great; I made my bed and was delighted to see I was still there.

For whatever reason, this dream was particularly vivid and I can still recall certain scenes in there. Since waking, I’ve begun pondering metaphysical questions relating to consciousness, like:

• What is consciousness? Simply sentience, or something deeper like an ego?
• Where does consciousness come from? Is it strictly physical (i.e. the brain), or is there some mystical power at play?
• If it is strictly physical, what are the consequences of this? People might eventually be inseparable from robots with advanced enough neural networks, or consciousness could be stored and transferred between bodies (see Altered Carbon for a novel based on this idea).

Turns out, these questions have been around for ages so I’m kind of late to the party. Still, this was a fun reminder that dreams are still weird and I still have much to explore in the realms of metaphysics.

Disclaimer: Trying out a more direct style of writing. Ideas from this passage come from Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.

The agreements we have with ourselves are everything.

Once upon a time, we woke up and were thrust into an unfamiliar world. There, we were rewarded for what our elders deemed “good”, and punished for what they deemed “bad”. We learnt languages and morals, ethics and religion – not because we asked for it, but because we couldn’t.

Along the way, we made agreements with ourselves. Agreements that shaped the way we saw ourselves in the world. One agreement might have been, I’m ugly, because a fellow classmate sneered at our clothing. Another agreement might’ve been, I’m poor, because we ate differently to others. And another, more terrible agreement might’ve been, I’m worthless, because someone told us so.

And over time, we’ve come to worship our agreements, no matter how terrible. Whenever something questions our agreements, we feel a funny feeling in our solar plexus and it’s called fear. Breaking our agreements makes us feel unsafe, because we’ve constructed our lives around them. And so, we go around carrying around beliefs about ourselves that are untrue and irrational, for the sake of feeling grounded. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

Thus, the biggest fear humans have is to be alive. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express who we really are.

All of humanity is searching for something, whether it be truth, justice or beauty. We keep searching and searching, but there is nothing to find. Everything is within us – for the agreements we have in our minds leave no room for the truth. We live in a fog that is not even real. We see the world through a filter; and sometimes, this filter is a horror lens. And so, some of us live in a living hell.

The agreements we have with ourselves are everything – for in a way, we’re all living in a dream. What our dream looks like, is up to us.

Disclaimer: I’m writing this as 2:30am as I realised yesterday was Thursday and woke up in a fright at missing my schedule. As a result, this may turn out to be a messy ramble that might not be representative of how I normally feel. Enjoy.

2020 has been a chaotic year. It’s brought on wonderful highs that have made my heart soar, and terrible lows that nearly drove me to take my own life. But wild experiences are often catalysts for growth, and this year was no different. Upon reflection, 2020 has been a breeding ground for insights, but here I’m just going to discuss the one that has been my biggest relevation.   

The idea is: being okay with stuff not being okay.

This year, I discovered that people can really suck. We human beings can be entirely contradictory, tell blatant lies and commit acts of shameful morals. We put on a persona and disguise acts of complete selfishness as acts of charity, deceiving others and ourselves in the process. And when we see others commit the same transgression as ourselves, we reel in horror and disgust. While it seems like I’m accusing others for this, I’m really only speaking for myself.  

But this is my favourite lesson of 2020: that things might suck, and this is okay.

As W. Somerset Maugham described this in his novel Of Human Bondage,

Then he saw that the normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect, of body or of mind: he thought of all the people he had known (the whole world was like a-sick-house, and there was no rhyme or reason in it), he saw a long procession, deformed in body and warped in mind, some with illness of the flesh, weak hearts or weak lungs, and some with illness of the spirit, languor of will, or a craving for liquor. At this moment he could feel a holy compassion for them all. They were the helpless instruments of blind chance.

Sure, people can suck. But why would we expect anything more? I doubt our ancestors were much holier than us. And history has revealed time and time again that humans are capable of pretty horrendous things.

Rather, if we reframe our worldview to see people as being naturally defected, we start seeing the good in others. We look past their failures and rejoice when we see a glimpse of scintillating morality.

Importantly, this radical acceptance of the state of things can be applied to other domains. 2020 had multiple global issues that touched upon cultural inequalities (BLM), a health crisis (Covid-19) and environmental illnesses (bushfires). While one could respond in offense and betrayal at the suffering in the world, it could be more productive just to accept it and act from there.

This is not to say that one should fly low in the face of mediocrity and injustice. Jesus loved the wretched but still tore down temples in the name of a higher goal. The danger I speak of is getting too attached to things being unfair. But instead, if we accept things for the state in which they are in, and avoid being overly idealistic, perhaps life can be lived in a happier and reasonable state.  

Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist and peace activist and is one of the most influential Buddhist teachers around today. I first encountered him a few years ago upon stumbling on one of his quotes, which I deeply resonated with:

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer a suffering that is familiar.

This quote also provided a neat antidote to my pathologic neuroticism a few years ago.

But today, I came upon this exquisite piece on Maria Popova’s blog (Brain Pickings) that addresses Thich Nhat Hanh’s four mantras on turning fear into love. Whenever I come across a great article, I usually attempt to summarise the key points and put in some personal reflections, but this piece was so well-written that I’ve decided the best I can do is to share the whole thing here – might add some thoughts in a separate post.

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The Four Buddhist Mantras for Turning Fear into Love

“Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her magnificent early work on love and how to live with fear. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”

This notion of presence as the antidote to fear and the crucible of love is as old as the human heart, as old as the consciousness that first felt the blade of anticipatory loss pressed against the exposed underbelly of the longing for connection. It is at the center of millennia-old Buddhist philosophy and comes alive afresh, in a splendidly practical way, in Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm (public library) by the great Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who continues to enrich, ennoble, and empower with his teachings well into his nineties.

In the general Buddhist style of befriending complexity through simplicity and with his particular gift for simple words strung into a rosary of immense wisdom radiating immense kindness, Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

We have a great, habitual fear inside ourselves. We’re afraid of many things — of our own death, of losing our loved ones, of change, of being alone. The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch nonfear. It’s only here and now that we can experience total relief, total happiness… In the practice of Buddhism, we see that all mental formations — including compassion, love, fear, sorrow, and despair — are organic in nature. We don’t need to be afraid of any of them, because transformation is always possible.

Such transformation is possible only through deliberate practice — none more challenging, or more rewarding, than the practice of transforming fear into love. In consonance with his teaching that “to love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” he anchors this transmutation practice in four mantras “effective for watering the seeds of happiness in yourself and your beloved and for transforming fear, suffering, and loneliness.”

Unlike a prayer — which channels a hope at some imagined entity capable of interceding in favor of that hope and has only as a side benefit (though arguably its only real and robust benefit) the psychological self-clarification that comes from honing our hopes in language — a mantra is not addressed at anything or anyone external and is entirely devoted to distilling the object of hope to its clearest essence. This, in and of itself, transforms the hope into an intent, making it more actionable — but also saving it from the particular complacency against which Descartes admonished as he considered the vital relationship between fear and hope. A mantra is therefore not a form of magical thinking, for while there is a sense of magic to how such distillation seems to shift the situation by its very utterance, it is an entirely practical sort of magic, for a mantra simply clarifies, concentrates, and consecrates intent, and all meaningful transformation springs from purposeful, devoted intent.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

A mantra is a kind of magic formula that, once uttered, can entirely change a situation. It can change us, and it can change others. But this magic formula must be spoken in concentration, with body and mind focused as one. What you say in this state of being becomes a mantra.

Within this conceptual framework, he offers four mantras for transforming fear into love, beginning with “Mantra for Offering Your Presence.” A generation after Simone Weil insisted that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” he writes:

The most precious gift you can give to the one you love is your true presence. So the first mantra is very simple: “Dear one, I am here for you.”

Simple though this mantra might seem, he reminds us that actually cultivating the capacity for it — the capacity for presence, which is where our capacity for love resides — is intensely difficult against the tidal wave of demand and distraction that sweeps everyday life and sweeps us along with it, leaving us always on the brink of drowning, bereft of what Emerson celebrated as “the power to swell the moment from the resources of our own heart until it supersedes sun & moon & solar system in its expanding immensity.”

A century after Tolstoy insisted that “love is a present activity only,” Thich Nhat Hanh gently reminds us that the greatest resource of our own heart — our greatest source of power, our mightiest antidote to fear — is the quality of love we give through the quality of our presence:

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? Come back to yourself, look into [their] eyes, and say, “Darling, you know something? I’m here for you.” You’re offering [them] your presence. You’re not preoccupied with the past or the future; you are there for your beloved. You must say this with your body and with your mind at the same time, and then you will see the transformation.

Such crystalline presence is the prerequisite for the next mantra — “Mantra for Recognizing Your Beloved”:

The second mantra is, “Darling, I know you are there, and I am so happy.”

To be there is the first step, and recognizing the presence of the other person is the second step. Because you are fully there, you recognize that the presence of your beloved is something very precious. You embrace your beloved with mindfulness, and he or she will bloom like a flower. To be loved means first of all to be recognized as existing.

In a sentiment of especial relevance and consolation in these disembodied times, he reminds us that these mantras can be performed across distance, across wires and cables and screens, not requiring the physical presence of the beloved — however they are articulated, they are at bottom meditations containing all four elements of true love as described by the Buddha: love, compassion, joy, and freedom.

While the third mantra, “Mantra for Relieving Suffering,” could be magnified and deepened by the atomic rewards of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “hugging meditation,” it too can be extended across the digital distance:

Even before you do anything to help, your wholehearted presence already brings some relief, because when we suffer, we have great need for presence of the person we love. If we are suffering and the person we love ignores us, we suffer more. So what you can do — right away — is to manifest your true presence to your beloved and say the mantra with all your mindfulness: “Dear one, I know you are suffering. That is why I am here for you.” And already your loved one will feel better.

Your presence is a miracle, your understanding of his or her pain is a miracle, and you are able to offer this aspect of your love immediately. Really try to be there, for yourself, for life, for the people you love. Recognize the presence of those who live in the same place as you, and try to be there when one of them is suffering, because your presence is so precious for this person.

The fourth and final mantra, “Mantra for Reaching Out to Ask for Help,” seems on the surface to be self-concerned, but is in fact the crucible of self-care from which all unselfish love and presence spring. It is also, Thich Nhat Hanh observes, the most difficult of the four, for it dwells in the place of our greatest vulnerability and at the same time pushes us to lean on our most crippling crutch:

This mantra is for when you are suffering and you believe that your beloved has caused you suffering. If someone else had done the same wrong to you, you would have suffered less. But this is the person you love the most, so you suffer deeply, and the last thing you feel like doing is to ask that person for help… So now it is your pride that is the obstacle to reconciliation and healing. According to the teaching of the Buddha, in true love there is no place for pride.

When you are suffering like this, you must go to the person you love and ask for his or her help. That is true love. Do not let pride keep you apart. You must overcome your pride. You must always go to him or her. That is what this mantra is for. Practice for yourself first, to bring about oneness of your body and mind before going to the other person to say the fourth mantra: “Dear one, I am suffering; please help.” This is very simple but very hard to do.

Complement this particular fragment of the wholly soul-salving Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm with Seneca on overcoming fear and Audre Lorde on turning fear into fire, then revisit the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön on transformation through difficult times.