From The Ridiculous To The Practical

From The Ridiculous To The Practical

I have been all around the world and have seen a lot of things. I used to make fun, if not openly at least privately of a lot of the things I saw. I am certainly older now and I hope wiser. I don't make as much fun of things anymore. I try to think, where is the practical in the ridiculous?

Take Meditation. Visual Imagery. Crystals. Howling at the moon. Things like that.

Imagining sitting on Mars and drinking tea with talking vegetables may work for you, it may be a way for you to get off your blood pressure medicine, but it isn't my cup of tea. However I realize it could be the next hit Saturday morning children's television show.

Meditation is one of those things that can be ridiculous or practical.

Meditation is basically thinking and thinking is pretty much the process of asking yourself questions and coming up with answers. We think on the conscious level and we think on the subconscious level.

Since meditation is thinking, when someone says they would never meditate I realize they probably don't understand what the definition of meditation really is or in some cases I just agree with them and say, "You know, I can see that in you."

If I were to sit around meditating on my navel I would probably start wondering if I had navel lint and if navel oranges were popular in the Navy when they figured out citrus prevented scurvy and why we laughed at the Naval Air Force joke when everyone knew it had nothing to do with forcing air through your naval.

On the other hand, meditation has a practical side.

First we hear people say that meditation isn't Christian. That is a big objection I hear. In the big picture mediation is really just thinking and  no one is going to convince me that true Christianity is against thinking. As a matter of fact, the bible tells us to meditate on scripture. There are plenty of interesting and practical lessons in the bible, not to mention principles and teachings, so thinking on the bible turns out to be pretty practical.

Then there are your problems. You really can't escape your problems. Recovering alcoholics know this. When they sober up their problems are right there where they left them and they usually have brought friends. You can't really escape your problems, because after all they are your problems, sort of like a faithful dog that follows you around and chews your slippers, but you can deal with them.

It is popular to tell people not to meditate or you might say dwell on your problems. I think that is good advice in general. What we think about tends to expand. Think about buying a certain new car and all of a sudden they are everywhere. On the other hand, if what we think about tends to expand or grow or become part of our life, then why not think on not our problems, but solutions for our problems?

Take Facebook, there is something that can be ridiculous or practical. Globally on average I see statistics that say people active on Facebook spend an average of 50 minutes a day on Facebook and that number is growing. It turns out that it is popular to say you are spending less time on Facebook, but studies show people are spending more.

The figures are in for September of 2016, if you can believe them, Facebook has had a little of a statistic scandal lately, but the numbers are 1.18 billion people were active daily that month on Facebook.

Get out an envelope and your pen, scribble a little and close one eye and you will find that means almost a billion human hours in one month were spent on Facebook. Since the number of people online is going up and the trend for usage is up, we can easily say we are looking at a billion hours a month going forward.

So how big is a billion? If you spent a thousand dollars a day ($1,000) how long would it take you to spend a billion dollars? Well, you can't, you won't live that long unless you know something I don't. If you started spending a thousand dollars a day at the time of Christ and Nero and Julius Caesar and Cleopatra and all of that group (yes, I know they didn't exactly live at the same exact time, this is just to get a rough idea of things) you still wouldn't be done. It would take you 2,740 years to spend those dollars at a thousand a day. So that means a thousand people spending one hour on something a day would take 2,740 years to spend a collective billion hours.

So here is my point. If we took half of those hours spent on Facebook and people spent them working on their problems what would happen? A half billion hours a month spent on people meditating and working on their problems, not just thinking problem, problem, problem, but on solutions to their problems,

Remember, you are in the world, your problems are the world's problems.

Well, I don't expect people to trim their Facebook time globally or for me to start a revolution, but what if I got you to just spend 20 minutes a day, half thinking on the solutions to your problems and half working on them using the answers you come up with? What would happen?

Try it and let me know.

Scott Hogue CChH

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