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Introduction

There is an inevitable tension here: we need hopes and dreams, but we also need to keep our feet on the ground; we need to aim high, but also have realistic expectations.  The challenge here is not to achieve a balance between these two opposing principles, but to understand when and how and to what extent each one is relevant and helpful.

Here are some thoughts which may be helpful.

Mindfulness

Many people claim to have been helped by the practice of mindfulness, but it leaves some people with significant mental problems, so any practice should be supervised by someone who is experienced in guiding people.

And mindfulness - concentrating on being 'present' in the moment, fully experiencing who you are, where you are, and when you are - is just one end of a spectrum.  The other end - being aware of where you want to go, what you want to be, planning and acting to achieve your goals - is also a necessary part of a healthy life.  Some people need to focus on the mindfulness because they spend so much of their time and energy at the other end; but, arguably, there are also people who spend so much time 'in the present' that they fail to adequately plan and prepare.

Meditation

There are various forms of meditation.  For now, we can simply distinguish between the forms in which you look inside and those where you look outside.

Concentrated attention on something significant to you is probably a necessary part of mastering any discipline or skill: looking more deeply at something, seeking to understand it better, to see what you may have missed or under-valued or misunderstood.

Introspection is always deceptive: in part because we lie to ourselves, in part because we don't understand what we are seeing, and in part because whenever we look, there is a part of us which is being looked at and another part which is doing the looking.  We cannot step outside ourselves and see who we are from the outside - and, even if we could, that view would only be of one side, in one place, at one time, engaged in one activity: whatever we saw would only be one small part of who we are.  And much of the activity of our mind is, of necessity, partly or totally subconscious: you are measuring the level of sugar in your blood and comparing it with the amount you anticipate needing, you are judging how firm and how slippery is the surface you are walking on, and adjusting your step accordingly, you are regulating how fast and how deeply you breathe, and a thousand other aspects of your metabolism.  If you needed to be aware of what your brain is doing, you would be overwhelmed, and unable to focus on the The most reliable technique for discovering what you are like, and what is going on within you, is not by looking within, but by observing - and being honest about - how you behave.

Many people are willing to teach meditation - by which, they generally mean a combination of introspection and mental discipline.  They may be genuine - that is, they may actually believe that they are able to do this - but it is not possible; they must be either fooling themselves or you.

It is possible to teach many things, but it is only possible to teach something if you have some way to determine whether the lesson has been learned.  You can teach mathematics, and see if the pupil can solve a maths problem; you can teach juggling, and see if the pupil can keep the balls in the air; you can teach a foreign language, and see if the pupil can converse in that language.  In every case, the pupil can see what you do, and learn to imitate you; and you can see what they do and determine whether it is done sufficiently well.

But no pupil can see what you do when you meditate; they can only hear you describe what you think you are doing and what you are aware of experiencing.  And you cannot see what they are doing when they meditate; you can only listen to what they tell you they think are doing and what they are aware of experiencing.  In practice, teaching meditation consists of teaching physical techniques, often related to relaxation and breathing.  These disciplines can themselves be helpful.  And, because the mind is connected with the body, physical techniques will often make a difference to mental activity, in much the same way that psychoactive drugs do.  So the meditation techniques appear to work, and the meditation teachers continue to get paid.

Confidence

Many of us are overly confident about things we understand and believe.  There are many reasons for this: it is, in part, because we need to make decisions, and it is often the case that it is better to make any reasonable decision than postpone the decision until you are certain it is correct - especially when the question concerns a potential risk.  Is that sound a dangerous animal nearby, hiding in the dark woods?  By the time you are certain, it's probably too late to run.  So we have to act when there is still reasonable doubt; and, at this point, the intellectual doubt is entirely irrelevant - we run from the tiger, and whether it was actually there is something we shall probably never know.

We have to respond to risk in this way, simply to survive.  And this applies as much to the risks of modern life as it did to the risks of searching for food in the forest.  We many not often risk being eaten by a large predator, but we do face risks to our career and social standing from colleagues who want (or want to deny you) that promotion, or the parents of your child's friends spreading stories that may (or may not) have some basis in fact.

So, in the real world we have to believe we know and understand what is happening, what other people are planning, and what their motives are.  We have to believe, and be sufficiently confident about it, in order to act.  The result is that we cannot allow ourselves to be ignorant about anything important - certainly not unless there is a clear and rapid way to establish the facts.  As a consequence, we find ourselves unable to handle ignorance.

Of course, as with any issue, some people experience the other side: they lack confidence, and fail to act when they need to.  More often, I suspect, many of us are overly confident in some areas and contexts, and not confident enough in others.  The challenge of achieving an appropriate level of confidence in each situation we find ourselves in will probably last a lifetime, but that doesn't mean we can't make significant progress in important areas.