Have You Tried Meditation?
I’m incredibly busy at work at the moment, as well as pretty occupied blogging in the evenings, both here, and at my UK personal finance site. This is making me tired.
My day job is one of those sedentary office things, so I’m not physically tired, as much as mentally tired. Needing to think whilst I’m blogging, whilst fun, can also be draining.
Normally, one of the best cures for tiredness is sleep and I’m a big fan of sleep. Sadly, it hasn’t done much for me lately. Although I’m tired, my mind is too busy to feel sleepy, and when I do sleep I’m having dreams about work 
.
A friend of mine suggested that I try a meditation session. A natural born skeptic, I did slightly balk at the new age-ness of it but then I remembered that it almost certainly wouldn’t do any harm to try it once.
Somehow, I don’t think it was a proper Buddhist style meditation thing, which is probably just as well. We sat (on chairs) in a circle with some candles in the middle, someone read a story, and there were periods of music and silence.
Do you know what, it was really quite refreshing. I spent a lot of time concentrating on the candles, and not thinking. Normally I’m not very good at not thinking, but on this occasion it came quite easily. I felt a lot more relaxed afterwards.
Quasi-meditation. Better than sleep.
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Pascal’s Wager Rebuttal is Inspiring
Pascal’s wager is a famous defence of theism. When I was about fourteen I thought it was a very profound theological statement, which I’ll paraphrase in the way I first heard it
If it’s true that God exists, then if you believe, once you’re dead you will end up in heaven and if you don’t believe then you will end up in hell. If on the other, God does not exist, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or not.
You’ve thus got nothing to lose and everything to gain by believing, therefore you should believe in God.
Now, there are one or two flaws in this argument. But my favourite rebuttal is that if God doesn’t exist and you only have one life, then you have lost everything if you waste it trying for life after death.
Actually, what I like is the point that you only have one life, and you shouldn’t waste it. Do what’s really important to you, fulfils you and makes you deeply happy. Dream as many dreams as there is time for, and live as many as you can.
One of my dreams is to travel to exotic countries. I have a really, really long list of all the places I want to go to. It starts with Outer Mongolia, and ends with Timbuktu, and almost every time I hear of a place, I want to go there.
Given that I’ve only got a five or six decades left in front of me, I should really get cracking on these travelling dreams. One of the places on my list is the Pyramids in Egypt. I’m saving up, and making plans to go this September.
How are you planning on making your dreams come true?
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