Letters

Dear comrades,

I write this letter to demonstrate my abilities as a contralogician, but also to provide you with theoretical knowledge that could help you in your everyday lives. This work will redefine the popular notion of the practice known as meditation and place it on a contralogical foundation.

If I am handing this to you, you are likely aware that some of us assume as a hypothesis that our entire reality is based on contradiction, or the unity of opposites. If this is correct, we should be able to take any existing phenomenon and break it down into its bi-unitary components. In the case of meditation, the fundamental contradiction is the bi-unity of work and rest.

Be aware that this is a work derived from my practical experiences. I was a Buddhist for six years of my life, at my peak skill spending whole days completely absorbed in meditative practice, for weeks at a time. When I explored the core Buddhist texts more deeply, I began to disagree with certain parts of the doctrine and eventually abandoned it altogether.

Because I had lost faith in the theory, I lost my motivation to practice. This isn't surprising if we consider that it is our ideas which shape our worldview that frames our daily activities. The rejection of those ideas will lead us to a different path even if we still recognize the value of the actions they generated. If we want to continue pursuing these actions after their justification was lost, we will have to find a new and higher justification that is in accordance with our new and higher level of personal development.

This is my attempt to rescue what I perceive to be the good aspects from the bad aspects of my Buddhist experience. I'm in desperate need of reincorporating meditation in my life due to the amount of stress that the current moment is calling for, and I'm here to share my synthesis of a secular meditative practice which I believe to be an invaluable tool for anyone who dares to struggle for a better future.

The words we use to define concepts and experiences are very important, but there is a complexity to our understanding of language that makes it necessary to redefine words to achieve desirable results in any given context. These definitions will never be precise but ultimately what matters is that they effectively serve the purpose that they were designed for. For our purposes we will be giving specific meanings to stress, work, rest, and meditation.

We can think of stress as a property that we possess which determines our physical and mental motion. It acts in the way that momentum does in the context of Newtonian mechanics. The more active we are, the more stress we experience. Our voluntary and involuntary actions generate stress, and so does our environment. Reducing our action and changing to a more relaxed environment can reduce our stress. A body completely at rest is a body without movement, which is equivalent to death. Thus, we can say that there is no life without stress.

From stress as the foundation of our perspective we will derive definitions of work and rest. Work is anything which increases stress, and rest is anything which decreases it. There are two types of each: the passive type and the active type. Passive work is the physical actions that generate stress which are independent of our will. If we apply our willpower to act in a way which generates stress, this would be considered active work. The same idea follows for passive and active rest.

Work and rest are not mutually exclusive here. There are things that happen which have both a component of work and a component of rest. One will likely dominate the other or even switch places depending on the context of the situation. It is possible for restful activity to become stressful, and vice versa. It is also possible for physical rest to generate mental stress, mental rest to generate physical stress, physical stress to generate mental rest, and mental stress to generate physical stress. The complexity of the topic is worth noting, but we won't elaborate on it here.

The way that meditation is commonly thought of in the popular sense is what we could consider a highly focused form of active resting. The practitioner attempts to bring the body and mind to a lower level of stress using various highly efficient techniques. Exerting willpower is a form of active work, so all active rest contains an element of stress, but in the case of popular meditation the work is always directly or indirectly aimed at constantly reducing stress. Though useful as an example, we are going to be abandoning this sense of meditation for now. I want you to think that I am here to teach you how to rest, not how to meditate.

If we are going to choose to live our lives as highly effective active workers, it would only make sense that we also become highly effective active resters. Many of us have suffered from burnout, the imbalance of work and rest in the ultimate favor of work, and continue to do so in an endless cycle. In the long-term this makes us highly ineffective or even counterproductive in the same way that we should not operate heavy machinery when we are deprived of sleep. We rise to the demands of our circumstances, but we neglect to adjust our self-care accordingly. This should stop.

There are many ways to induce rest, but the engineer inside of me is telling you that we should learn how to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible. We want to reach a state of being fully conscious active resters. When we choose to rest without knowing the best possible way to do so, we are only partially conscious. Why? Because, with few exceptions, if we knew a better way we would be pursuing it. This is the rational action of individuals skilled in their practice.

I'm out of time. Please let me know if this interests you and I will continue. I would like to go into detail on the mechanism of rest, some techniques that can be employed to maximize it, and how Buddhist concepts translate to secular experiences.

All the best,

[REDACTED]