FINDING REALITY
THOREAU‘S LESSONS FOR LIVING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
NATE KLEMP, PhD
FINDING REALITY
DD
Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If
we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in
our throats and feel cold in the extremities;
if we are alive, let us go about our business.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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TO MARTY
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This work is licensed by the
Creative Commons
under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
Unported License.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nate Klemp studied philosophy as an
undergrad at Stanford University and earned
his PhD at Princeton University. He is
currently a professor at Pepperdine University
in Malibu, California. Klemp is the founder
of LifeBeyondLogic.com, a website dedicated
to exploring philosophy as an art of living.
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Introduction
It’s 7am. I hear the ―Xylophone‖ ringtone of my
iPhone coming from my bedside table. For five
minutes, I lie in bed staring at the ceiling. Fleeting
thoughts and glimmers of early morning sun make up my
reality.
7:05am. I roll over and grab my iPad. One quick
finger flick later and I shift to a new reality. I start in the
world of news. I scan the headlines – a revolution‘s
breaking out, a celebrity‘s going to jail, and there‘s now
some new food that‘s going to give me cancer.
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7:13am. Reality shift number three. I touch the
―Facebook‖ tab and enter into a virtual conversation
with a few hundred friends. Someone just had a baby,
another person‘s complaining about the flu, another
commented on my witty status update from the day
before.
7:20am. Time for another shift. My finger moves
instinctively – with no thought whatsoever – to the
Twitter tab. Now I‘m in a new world. It‘s still a
conversation, but in this world I get to talk to friends as
well as mega-celebrities like Charlie Sheen, Lance
Armstrong, and President Obama. I scan the list of
incoming tweets and shoot off one of my own,
something about staying grounded in the present
moment during the day ahead.
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7:30am. My physical reality has shifted slightly. I‘m
now clothed and sitting at the table eating eggs. My
mental reality has also shifted. No more Twitter. Now
I‘m scanning through my email inbox, responding to
student requests, notes from friends, and deleting spam
from online Backpacking stores and penis enhancement
services.
7:52am. Done with email. Time to shift realities
once again. Now I open my website –
LifeBeyondLogic.com. I read through comments from
readers and do my best to offer a helpful response.
8:00am. I‘ve only been in the waking state for one
hour. And yet on this day, like most other days, I‘ve
moved effortlessly through six different worlds of
experience. I have weaved my way through
GoogleNews, The New York Times, Facebook, Twitter,
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MacMail, LifeBeyondLogic.com, and more.
This is a normal hour of a normal day. It‘s the way
most of us live. Our grandparents shifted from one
reality to the next at a snail‘s pace. They woke up,
walked outside to get the paper, drove to work, and
waited all day for the afternoon mail. We shift realities
in an instant.
We now live in so many worlds. We dance
throughout the day between the virtual and the actual.
In one moment, we‘re having lunch with a close friend.
In the next, we‘re engaged in a virtual conversation with
people throughout the world.
We‘re connected to so many overlapping worlds it‘s
often difficult to find our deepest reality. Our Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn, email, and real-space identities can
leave us wondering: Who am I? What is real?
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Finding Reality offers one possible
answer to the question: what is real? It‘s
an answer drawn from America‘s great
19th century philosopher, Henry David
Thoreau.
Thoreau might seem like an odd pick
to guide us out of this state of digital
disorientation. He lived in a different time.
In his day, the newspaper sat at the
cutting edge of information technology.
Now it‘s Google, Facebook, Digg, and
Delicious.
During his two years and two months at Walden
Pond, he lived in near total isolation: no cable, no
Internet, no news from the outside world. He made
occasional visits to town but spent the bulk of his time
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by himself, hoeing beans, measuring the pond, walking,
and sitting ―in the boat playing the flute.‖
Our experience couldn‘t be more different. We live
in a state of constant communication and connection.
So what does this solitary woodsman have to
teach us about finding reality in the digital age?
When I teach Walden, students often worry about this
question. They see Thoreau‘s project as irrelevant to
modern life. ―Good for Thoreau,‖ they say, ―but I can‘t
quit school, burn my laptop, and move to the woods.‖
There is a lot of truth to this concern. Most of us
have families. We have jobs. We have social
commitments. We have mortgages, rent, and other bills
to pay. We can‘t just cut the cord on our broadband
connection, throw our iPhones into a river, and build a
cabin for $28.12 ½ (that‘s not a typo, apparently they
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had half-cents in Thoreau‘s day).
But at its core, Thoreau‘s project isn‘t about
abandoning technology and living in isolation. In fact,
Thoreau advocates taking advantage of the latest gadgets
and tools: ―Though…we might possibly live in a cave or
a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to
accept the advantages…which the invention and industry
of mankind offer.‖
Thoreau’s experiment is about something
deeper. It’s about living well. It’s about finding
reality.
Thoreau can‘t teach us lifehacks to maximize our
email efficiency or sort through our Twitter feeds. His
teaching is less specific, more universal. It‘s about
becoming conscious of who we are – of our deepest state
of awareness – when we do these things.
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Visit Walden Pond and you‘ll see a sign displaying
what might be the most important passage in Walden:
It doesn‘t matter what you choose to do with your life,
whether you spend your time toiling in front of a
computer or walking through the woods. What matters
for Thoreau is whether you live each moment fully and
deliberately. What matters is whether you find reality in
each moment.
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This is not some abstract philosophical teaching. It
has little to do with any established religion. It has little
to do with figuring things out logically or rationally.
What Thoreau advocates is simply a practical way of
living a fuller, happier, and more conscious life.
Thoreau found reality in the woods. In Finding
Reality, we‘ll explore how to find it anywhere, from the
woods of Walden to the newsfeed of Facebook.
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What is Real?
I first questioned the existence of reality outside an
organic market in Boulder. It wasn‘t the smell of fresh
cooked vegan brownies or the sight of white guys with
dreadlocks and hemp necklaces. Nor was it the
Superfood juice drink induced sugar high that left me
questioning reality. It was a short reading assigned by my
high school writing teacher Mr. White: Rene Descartes‘
Meditations on First Philosophy.
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As I sat outside with my best friend Thad, we
experienced first-hand Descartes‘ spiral into doubt.
―He‘s basically saying that ‗reality‘ might not be real
because we have no way of knowing whether we are
awake or in a dream,‖ I said.
―He might be right,‖ Thad insisted. ―When I‘m
dreaming it feels exactly the same as when I‘m awake. I
feel the same pains, pleasures, emotions, and sensations.‖
―So how do we know whether any of this is real?
Maybe we‘re in a dream and we just don‘t know it.
Maybe this table doesn‘t exist. Maybe it‘s all just a
hallucination.‖
The further we pushed Descartes‘ ―method of
doubt,‖ the more we questioned whether we could know
anything. As we finished eating and trekked back to
Boulder High, I experienced an altered state. For a few
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moments, I felt what it might be like to live with the
radical thought that all of this is just a dream.
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Descartes‘ Reality
Look up ―reality‖ and you‘ll find it defined as
something actual rather than apparent. It‘s the opposite
of illusions, hallucinations, and dreams. It‘s the
experience of what‘s really here – of a world that exists
outside of our ideas, thoughts, and fantasies.
Long before Thoreau, the French Philosopher Rene
Descartes grappled with the problem of finding reality.
Unlike Thoreau, Descartes wasn‘t worried about cutting
through social ―shams and delusions.‖ Instead, he
worried about the slippery distinction between the
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dreaming and waking state. In the dream state, we
experience a vivid reality. We feel emotional and
physical pain. We see, hear, touch, and feel sensations
just like in waking life.
This blurry distinction between the dream state and
what we call reality sent him into his downward spiral of
doubt. He spent years in isolation trying to come up
with some way out of it, trying to find some firm
foundation to anchor reality. Descartes‘ solution was to
locate the core of reality in the mind. How do I know
that I am real – that I exist? Descartes tells us that “This
proposition I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is
expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.”
You‘ve probably heard the philosophical cliché for
this conclusion: cogito ergo sum (―I think, therefore I am‖).
For what we‘re up to, it‘s not all that important to talk
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about how he lands here. Check out his Meditations on
First Philosophy to get the full story. What‘s important is
that he locates the core of reality in the mind. It is
through my capacity to think that I know I am real. As
Descartes says, ―But what, then, am I? A thinking thing,
it has been said. But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing
that doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies,
wills, refuses; that imagines also, and perceives.‖ The
fact that Descartes was able to question his existence was
itself proof of existence. If I doubt my own existence,
then there must be an I – a doubting agent who exists.
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Thoreau‘s Reality
Have you ever had the experience of sleepwalking
through life? I don‘t mean literal sleepwalking. I mean
that feeling of driving across town, parking your car, and
realizing you weren’t really there during the whole trip.
Maybe you lost yourself in worries about an upcoming
event. Or maybe you were just spaced out.
You didn‘t fall asleep during this trip. But you did
enter into a state somewhere between sleeping and
waking – a state where you could drive safely but where
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your awareness went somewhere else.
Is this reality? Descartes does a masterful job of
drawing a line between dreaming and waking. But he
doesn‘t give us the tools for finding the deepest reality in
the waking state.
This is Thoreau‘s genius. Thoreau‘s not worried
about distinguishing dreaming from waking
consciousness. He‘s not worried about whether tables
and chairs really exist or even whether he exists.
He‘s worried about whether our waking experience
has us move through life without awareness or whether it
brings us into contact with the reality of each moment.
For him, the really interesting question is not ―do I
exist?‖ but ―what is the quality of my existence? Am I
‗slumbering‘ through life or am I living full out?‖
Thoreau still uses the words ―sleeping‖ and
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―waking.‖ But for him, sleep is a metaphor for living
unconsciously. It‘s the way most of us spend our waking
hours. In fact, Thoreau says that almost everyone he‘s
met appears to ―slumber‖ through life, missing the
deepest experience of reality. ―I have never yet met a
man,‖ he insists, ―who was quite awake.‖
What keeps us sleepwalking through life? Habit and
routine. When we move through life unconsciously –
from one scripted act to the next – it‘s as though we‘re
on autopilot. We move out of a ―daily life of routine and
habit everywhere.‖
This is what makes our routine drive to the store
vanish from awareness. We‘ve driven this route
thousands of times. And so we go on autopilot. We let
our instincts take over and lose ourselves in thought.
We may accomplish many things in this state. We
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may win awards and make millions. But if we live each
day following the routines we‘ve inherited from friends,
parents, and society, then our actions in each moment
arise – not from creative freedom – but our unconscious
habits and social programming.
It‘s not just routine that keeps us asleep at the wheel
of life. It‘s also what Thoreau calls the ―petty fears and
petty pleasures‖ that are ―but the shadow of reality.‖ In
his day, it was his fellow townsmen‘s obsession with
―gossip‖ and ―the news.‖ In our day, it might be our
obsession with celebrity gossip, reality TV, Facebook
newsfeeds, and so on and so on. Thoreau‘s insight – the
more we direct our attention to this external world of
―petty pleasures,‖ the more we fall asleep to the deepest
experience of reality.
To find reality, we must use each moment as an
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opportunity to wake up. As Thoreau puts it, ―to be
awake is to be alive….we must learn to reawaken and
keep ourselves awake.‖ The act of ―awakening‖ sounds
mystical. But it doesn‘t need to be a religious or spiritual
act. Thoreau‘s pointing to a simple shift of awareness –
a shift out of routine and ―petty pleasure‖ to
experiencing each moment as an opportunity for living
improvisation.
For Thoreau, this act of living consciously is the
highest human endeavor. As he declares:
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture,
or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects
beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint
the very atmosphere and medium through which we
look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of
the day, that is the highest of arts.
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This is what it means to awaken and find reality. It is
what Thoreau calls the act of elevating ―life by a
conscious endeavor.‖ We end our ―slumbering‖ through
life when we treat each moment like the jazz musician
treats melodies or the sculptor treats a piece of marble –
as an opportunity to create something new. The ultimate
goal is to ―carve and paint the very atmosphere and
medium through which we look.‖ It is to become an
artist of the inner world.
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The Bottom of Reality
Have you ever felt your reality shift to what felt like a
deeper layer of experience? Have you felt fully awake to
the moment? I was 20-years old and living in Cuba the
first time this happened to me. I had traveled south
from Havana to a small beach near the town of Trinidad
on the southern side of the island.
For the first time in a long time, I had nothing to do.
Three thousand miles separated me from the chaos of
undergraduate life at Stanford. I had no homework, no
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papers, no dorm meetings. It was an experience of pure
freedom.
For no apparent reason, I left a conversation with
friends on the beach and waded into the emerald green
water. As soon as the ocean hit my waistline, I stopped
walking and spent the next hour sitting on my knees in
stillness.
Small waves rocked me back and forth. I fixed my
gaze on the horizon line, where ocean meets sky. Those
were the days before I practiced yoga. I didn‘t know a
thing about meditation. I had no technique, no real
reason for sitting in stillness. But for some reason, I just
sat there in awe.
This may have been my first taste of raw reality. For
that hour, thoughts and stories continued to circulate in
my mind. But they felt lighter – like background music
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playing at the lowest volume. I felt connected to
something deeper than the churning of thoughts. I
experienced the water and the blue sky with no filter, no
mediation. It felt pure and direct. No stories, no
worries, just what Thoreau calls the experience of ―This
is.‖
I‘m sure you‘ve have had similar moments, while
playing sports, attending church, practicing yoga, hiking,
or listening to music. Some call it ―the zone.‖ Others
call it ―flow‖ – that ―state in which people are so
involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.‖
Thoreau called it ―reality.‖ It‘s the state of
consciousness we arrive at when we drop beneath ―petty
fears and petty pleasures.‖ It‘s the state we encounter
when we break out of routine and experience the fullness
of the moment, what he called ―the marrow of life.‖
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Layers of Reality
Look closely at each moment and you‘ll see that
reality has layers. We experience reality like a layer cake,
the kind with frosting on the top followed by a layer of
yellow and then chocolate cake. In cake eating, as in
life, it‘s easy to become so captivated by the frosting that
we miss what‘s underneath.
In Walden, there‘s a beautiful passage where Thoreau
points to the layering of reality. Here‘s how he describes
it: ―Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet
downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and
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prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance,
that alluvion which covers the globe…till we come to a
hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality,
and say, This is, and no mistake.‖
Thoreau describes our daily experience as a bog – a
kind of swamp of life. If you look only at the surface of
this swamp, you‘ll see nothing but ―mud and slush.‖
You‘ll see the world of thought and opinion.
Most of us spend our days lost in this surface layer
of experience. We worry about what other people think
of us. We get pissed off at the guy who cuts in front of
us on the freeway. And we get way too interested in the
sordid lives of Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, and
Charlie Sheen.
When we live life on autopilot – allowing habit and
routine to shape our actions – then we get stuck in the
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mud and slush of the bog.
Reality TV, People Magazine, TMZ, and gossip
blogs – these are the things that titillate our unconscious
addiction to the surface of the bog. In Thoreau‘s day, it
was the newspaper. As he says:
I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If
we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed
by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel
wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow
run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog
killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we
never need read of another. One is enough.
There‘s nothing inherently wrong with the news, with
the pseudo-realities of stories from far away. The news
can inform us about important issues in our
communities and the world. What concerns Thoreau is
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when staying informed turns into an obsession, when we
get so involved in other people‘s lives that we forget
about our own. This kind of obsession separates us
from our present experience. It leaves us firmly
entrenched on the surface of the bog.
With conscious attention, however, we can drop
beneath the surface of reality. We can ―work and wedge
our feet downward‖ and begin to experience each
moment more directly and deeply. When we do this, we
shift our attention from ―shams and delusions‖ to the
experience of what Thoreau calls the ―hard bottom‖ of
reality. We discover ―reality, and say, This is, and no
mistake.‖
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Four Paths to Reality
It‘s relatively easy to understand what Thoreau calls
reality. We‘ve all had experiences where we felt more
connected and alive to the moment. We‘ve all
experienced ―the zone‖ or the state of ―flow.‖
We‘ve also all had experiences of ―slumbering‖
through life. We know what it‘s like to get caught in
habit and to lose the fullness of each moment to the
―shams and delusions‖ of everyday life.
So the real question is: how can we spend more
time in reality and less time caught in “petty fears
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and petty pleasures”?
There‘s no one set of practices for shifting from
routine to reality. You may have your own ways of
getting there that work for you. But on my reading,
Thoreau gives us four ways to break out of habit and
experience reality: Life Downsizing, Inner Journeying, Presence,
and Doing Nothing.
I‘ve tested these out in my own life and have found
them to be essential tools for dissolving habit and finding
reality.
1. Life Downsizing
Lately, there‘s been a lot of talk about downsizing
your life. You can read magazines like Simple Living or
minimalist blogs like Leo Babauta‘s Zen Habits, Tammy
Strobel‘s Rowdy Kittens, Courtney Carver‘s Be More With
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Less, or Joshua Becker‘s Becoming Minimalist. There‘s a
simple explanation for this revolution in minimalist
living: our lives have been super-sized.
We shop at Walmart, Costco, or Target. We buy the
latest flat-screen TVs, Blue-Ray Players, and iPods. We
buy clothes, trinkets, and other things that fill our living
space. We not only accumulate objects, we also collect
virtual things. We buy the latest apps for our iPhones,
iPads, and computers. Our email inboxes overflow with
new messages. Newly downloaded files and folders
clutter our desktops.
We have ended up with so many things – both actual
and virtual – that a good deal of our time is spent simply
managing them. Cars need tune-ups, bikes need new
tires, pools need cleaning, lawns need mowing, houses
need painting. Likewise, emails need sorting, files need
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managing, and applications need updates. If we‘re not
careful, we can end up spending all our waking hours
split between managing work and managing things, with
no time left to live.
The problem is that the more time and energy we
devote to thing management, the less we have for finding
reality. Our things draw us out of the moment and into
the world of ―petty fears and petty pleasures.‖
How do you break out of thing management?
Here‘s Thoreau‘s advice: ―simplify, simplify.‖ As he
explains, ―our life is flittered away by detail…I say, let
your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a
thousand.‖
Thoreau‘s minimalism isn‘t based on some abstract
principle. It‘s based on the practical insight that the
more stuff you have, the more time you spend keeping
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track of it and, thus, the less time you spend living in
reality. It‘s that simple. The more tools and gadgets we
acquire, the more we become distracted and disoriented
from the moment. ―But lo!‖ Thoreau insists, ―men have
become tools of their tools.‖
So here are two ways of downsizing your life:
Real-Space Downsizing– Take an inventory of all
the things you have and all the things you wish you could
have. How many of them could you live without? On
the surface, it might seem like you need forty pairs of
shoes or that you would be happier driving an Audi S5
Coupe. But remember Thoreau‘s insight – there is a
cost to having too much stuff. The more things we own,
the more our things begin to own us, the more we
become detached from reality.
Virtual Downsizing – Downsizing isn‘t just about
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the things that fill your living space. It cuts deeper, into
the many virtual spaces we inhabit. So here are a few
tips for minimalist online living:
 Declutter your Desktop – Consolidate files into folders
so your virtual workspace doesn‘t feel like an
overwhelming mess of files.
 Filter your Social Media – Don‘t waste your time
reading every tweet or status update. On Facebook,
hide the status updates of people who you don‘t care
to hear from. On Twitter, create a list of the 10 or
15 people whose tweets give you the most insight
and inspiration. I follow around 100 people, but
have a private list called ―really-following‖ for the
people I‘m most interested in.
 Set Limits – This is a key idea of the new minimalists.
Don‘t keep your email, TweetDeck, and Facebook
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accounts open all day. If you do, they will constantly
distract you, drawing your attention away from your
creative work to status updates about someone who
is boarding a plane or waiting in line at the bank.
Thanks to Ev Bogue, Leo Babuata, and others, I am
now in the practice of only checking these tools once
a day. If that‘s impossible, try twice a day. The key
point is that you want to avoid letting these virtual
―things‖ dictate the flow of your day. By setting
limits, you put yourself back in the driver‘s seat.
2. Inner Journeying
Downsizing your life is a good first step to finding
reality. But it‘s not going to get you all the way.
Ultimately, your experience of each moment isn‘t shaped
by the actual and virtual things you own. It goes way
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deeper. It‘s shaped by your awareness.
―Awareness‖ or ―consciousness‖ can be tricky to
define. These are words you‘re likely to hear thrown
around at a yoga class or on a magazine cover in the
checkout line of Whole Foods.
But Thoreau gives us a simple definition: awareness
is the lens through which we experience thoughts and
sensations.
Awareness unlocks the door to reality because it
shapes our experience of each moment. Focus your
awareness on the stuff you wish you had or the celebrity
who just went to jail and you‘ll find yourself on the
surface of the bog. Focus your awareness on this
moment and you‘ll find yourself in reality.
Thoreau‘s great teaching is how to become artists of
awareness. It‘s a great thing to paint, dance, or sculpt.
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But, as we have seen, for Thoreau, the ultimate human
achievement lies in crafting this lens of experience –
learning ―to carve and paint the very atmosphere and
medium through which we look.‖
The first step to becoming an artist of awareness is
inner journeying. When your awareness rests outside,
on ―petty fears and petty pleasures,‖ reality becomes
elusive. You find yourself getting way too interested in
who got voted off American Idol last week (I speak from
personal experience on that one) or how your neighbor
was able to afford that shiny new Lexus.
To find reality, we must shift our attention inside.
We must take an inner journey. Thoreau talks about
travel to make this point. Rather than wasting your time
and money traveling the globe, he advocates inner
traveling. ―Be…the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of
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your own streams and oceans,‖ he explains. ―Explore
your own higher latitudes…Nay, be a Columbus to
whole new continents and worlds within you, opening
new channels, not of trade, but of thought.‖ This inner
journey helps shift our awareness away from the surface
of the bog to the inner experience of this moment.
How do you shift awareness from outside to
inside? One way is to catch yourself each time your
awareness gets scattered and caught up in external
affairs, each time you‘re in other people‘s business.
Catching yourself opens the door to inner journeying. It
gives you the signal that it‘s time for an awareness shift.
To practice this shift, I recommend the following
meditation. You won‘t find this in Walden. Thoreau
loved The Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, and other eastern texts
but he missed out on the rise of yoga and meditation in
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the West (though I‘m convinced that if it were around in
his day, he would have been an avid yogi).
The Easy Shift – Here‘s a simple meditation to help
you begin to experience inner journeying – to shift your
awareness inside:
 Find a quiet place and sit, either on the floor or on
the edge of a chair. You can also experiment with
standing or lying on your back.
 Your spine and head should be upright – as if
suspended from a string attached to the crown of
your head.
 Place your left hand over your heart and your right
hand on your belly. Use your hands to help direct
your awareness into your body. You‘ll notice
thoughts and stories arise. Let them come and go.
Bring your awareness back into your heart center.
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 As you continue to breathe into the heart, notice
what happens when you pause for a moment at the
top of your inhale. Notice any sensations or feelings
that arise when your body is full of breath.
 Continue for as long as you would like (it could be
10 minutes or 2 hours).
Each night, I fall asleep doing this meditation. It not
only helps calm your nervous system and mind. It also
gives you the experience of the inward shift in awareness
required for finding reality.
The Hard Shift – It‘s relatively easy to shift inside
while meditating. Here‘s the more challenging task: can
you maintain this inward awareness while surfing
the web, chatting on IM, or checking email?
This is true enlightenment. And it‘s way harder than
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going inside while sitting cross-legged with your eyes
closed.
Here are a few tips for how to combine the inner
journeying meditation with the everyday experience of
surfing the web:
 Go Slow – The faster you move through virtual space,
the more your awareness will shift out of your inner
experience and into the external reality of the online
space.
 Breathe – To anchor yourself in your inner
experience, keep your breath smooth and fluid. At
the very least, be sure that you check in with your
breath periodically (you might even set a 10-minute
timer to remind you).
 Inner Web-Surfing – If you‘re going slow and
breathing, you can now experiment with the dual
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consciousness of inner web-surfing. To do this, see
if you can simultaneously experience the sensations
in your body and the latest posts or email messages
on the screen. It should feel like you‘re no longer
experiencing the online space from your head, which
is our natural habit, but from your body and breath.
I know this sounds crazy. But it will help you bring
the deepest experience of reality with you into the
chaos of the virtual world.
3. Presence
―Presence‖ is another word like ―awareness‖ or
―consciousness.‖ It‘s one of those nebulous terms of
New Age culture. But presence is simple. It‘s the state
we experience when we bring awareness into this
moment.
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Here’s how you can experience presence right
now. Stop reading. Notice where you are, any sounds,
and any sensations in your body. If thoughts about the
past or future come up, let them go and draw yourself
back to experiencing what‘s here now.
This present reality is always here. It simply requires
a shift in awareness to experience it.
Understanding presence is easy. Living each
moment in presence is one of the most difficult
challenges I‘ve ever faced.
The worries, desires, and pleasures at the surface of
the bog are what make presence so elusive. You might
be present one moment and in the next lost in thoughts
about a person who betrayed you or an upcoming event
you wish you didn‘t have to attend.
The mind‘s rapid-fire habit of shifting to past and
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future can easily mask reality. This is why Thoreau
worries about our obsession with the news. He worries
that we can become so interested in other places, people,
and moments that we lose sight of the news of this
moment. So he advises: ―If you chance to live and
move and have your being in that thin stratum in which
the events that make the news transpire, — thinner than
the paper on which it is printed, — then these things will
fill the world for you.‖ We become present when we
follow the ―thin stratum‖ of events happening right here,
right now.
I can try my best to wrap words around the
experience of presence, but I can‘t match Thoreau‘s
description:
Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the
system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and
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after the last man. In eternity there is indeed
something true and sublime. But all these times and
places and occasions are now and here. God himself
culminates in the present moment, and will never be
more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
This shift of awareness brings us more fully into reality.
It allows us to shift from looking for truth ―in the
outskirts of the system‖ to finding it ―now and here.‖
How do you get present? Like inner journeying,
the first step is catching when awareness drifts to
thoughts about the past or future. This signals the need
for an inner shift.
Meditation is one way to practice this shift. But
here‘s the easiest way to get present: bring your
awareness to the breath.
Simply observe the rhythm, quality, and length of
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your breath. As many philosophers and spiritual teachers
point out, the breath is always happening right now. So
if you focus on your inhales and exhales, you not only
have the opportunity to breathe more fully, you enter
into this moment.
You can try this while meditating. But, as with inner
journeying, the real challenge is to bring this experience
into everyday life. So next time you‘re stuck in traffic,
worried about the future, or frustrated that your email
won‘t open, get present. Bring your awareness to the
breath and see if you can shift from the surface of the
bog to this deeper layer of reality.
It sounds easy but you‘ll find that habit and routine
can quickly throw you out of the present. So staying
present – especially during the stressful flow of everyday
life – requires a moment-to-moment commitment.
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Here‘s one final way to practice presence – Take a
few moments each day to enjoy something
beautiful. Let yourself drink in the beauty of sights,
sounds, and experiences. Thoreau used sunsets for this
practice. As he says, ―Really to see the sun rise or go
down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact,
would preserve us sane forever.‖ But you might find
beauty somewhere else. Maybe it‘s in jazz clubs, art
galleries, or walks through the woods. This experience
of the awe-inspiring will draw your awareness into the
present moment, into reality.
4. Doing Nothing
What percentage of your waking hours do you spend
doing something? If you‘re like me, it‘s about 100%.
You wake up, brush your teeth, take a shower, fix
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breakfast, and eat. Then you go to work, send emails, sit
in meetings, and talk on the phone. After a long day and
a few errands on your way home, you collapse on the
couch and watch an hour or two of TV.
Your days might not look exactly like this. But I bet
they include a lot of doing.
There‘s nothing wrong with all this doing. It allows
us to pay the rent and to give our gift to the world. But
Thoreau reminds us that if we get too lost in the flow of
doing, reality becomes elusive. The constant doing of
modern life leaves us lost in thoughts about what we did,
what we didn‘t do, and what we need to do. For me, this
can get so intense that I occasionally do yoga with a
checklist nearby to write down each new to-do that comes
to mind.
Thoreau offers a radical solution. He advises taking
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a break from doing, intentionally interrupting the
productive flow of our day by doing nothing.
In a culture that values productivity, this sounds like
a radical, almost insane, practice. But if we‘re interested
in reality, it‘s essential. Doing nothing breaks us out of
the surface. It opens a space for dropping our
experience deeper into the reality of each moment.
In Walden, Thoreau offers a poetic description of the
virtues of unproductive nothingness:
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans.
Nay, I often did better than this. There were times
when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the
present moment to any work, whether of the head or
hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes,
in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed
bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till
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noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories
and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness,
while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless
through the house, until by the sun falling in at my
west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon
on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse
of time.
Nowadays, we have words for someone like this –
―lazy,‖ ―narcissistic,‖ ―unproductive.‖ Thoreau‘s day
was no different. He knew that ―if a man walk in the
woods for love of them…he is in danger of being
regarded as a loafer.‖
This is why doing nothing is such a radical act. It
stands in opposition to our sacred reverence for work
and productivity.
I‘m not suggesting that you quit your job and spend
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your days standing in a ―sunny doorway from sunrise till
noon.‖ But you will find that by doing nothing – even
for just 10-minutes – you‘re reminded of reality. Pure
nothingness will break you out of ―slumbering‖ through
the day and bring you into this moment.
You can do this any way you like. You might sit in a
park or lie down in the grass. There is no goal. There is
no value-add. This is a time to stop doing and simply be.
It‘s a time for finding reality.
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Conclusion
Thoreau lived in a different time. But he explored a
question with timeless implications: how can we ―live
deep‖ and ―suck out all the marrow of life‖? How can
we find reality?
I‘ve given you my interpretation of Thoreau‘s
answer. But you should feel free to disagree with,
challenge, and throw aside anything I‘ve said that doesn‘t
work for you. If you have the time, I also recommend
checking out Thoreau‘s works for yourself. You might
start with the ―Economy‖ and ―Where and Lived and
What I Lived For‖ Chapters of Walden. Then, I would
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recommend essays like ―Walking,‖ ―Civil Disobedience,‖
and ―Life Without Principle.‖
This ebook is free and comes without any cost. For
me, it‘s a way of communicating an idea I‘m passionate
about to as many people as possible. So if you enjoyed
the book, if you found it helpful or inspiring, I ask only
one thing – that you share it with your friends and
family. You‘ll find the link to download it on my website
(LifeBeyondLogic.com). Please email it, post it on
Facebook, or tweet it to anyone else who might be
interested.
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Finding Reality Online
The Internet can occasionally distract and disorient us. But it also offers amazing
resources for living a fuller, happier, more conscious life. Here is a short list of my
favorites:
 Byron Katie‘s TheWork.com – Katie is a master teacher of questioning
your stressful thoughts so that you can come into harmony with reality.
She also runs workshops and retreats at the Center for the Work in Ojai,
California. ―Perfection,‖ she says, ―is another name for reality.‖
 Gay and Katie Hendricks – Gay and Katie run the Hendricks Institute in
Ojai, California. They offer extensive online resources as well as retreats
and workshops.
 Gretchen Rubin‘s The Happiness Project – Gretchen‘s blog explores
ancient wisdom and the latest scientific research on happiness. She is
also the author of the New York Times Best Seller, The Happiness
Project.
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 Danielle LaPorte‘s The White Hot Truth – The tag line of Danielle‘s
blog says it all ―because self realization rocks.‖ Her thoughts on living
well are funny, inspiring, and provocative.
 Jonathan Fields – Jonathan has one of the best blogs out there on the
integration of business and life. His posts explore how to bring greater
consciousness and authenticity into your work life.
 Carolyn Rubenstein‘s A Beautiful Ripple Effect – Carolyn writes about
inspiration, authenticity, and letting go of perfectionism. Her posts offer
great tools for living well.
 Tammy Strobel‘s Rowdy Kittens – Tammy works at the intersection of
life and minimalism. Her posts explore how to let go of the clutter in
your life and how to live a happier, fuller, life.
 Courtney Carver‘s Be More With Less – Courtney‘s blog offers deep
insight into both how to downsize your life and how to live well.
 Life Beyond Logic – A bit of shameless self-promotion here. My blog
explores a new philosophical idea each week, not by analyzing or
dissecting it, but by living it.
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Acknowledgments
I‘m grateful to Marty Weiner and Diana Chapman for inspiring
me to live my dream of exploring philosophy as a way of life.
I‘m thankful to Marco Cosentino and Mason Marshall for our
conversations about Thoreau‘s view of reality and the art of living
well.
Many others have helped me explore these ideas. Dara and
Chad Creasey have helped support me in this vision and Dara has
played a key role in launching Life Beyond Logic. Thad Wong, Liz
Essary, Audrey Hazekamp and Ryan Van Duzer offered invaluable
inspiration along the way.
My parents, Margi and Joe, have help make this book and all of
my adventures in life possible. Even when I‘ve veered far from the
path of the expected, they have supported me in following my dream.
None of this would have been possible without the support of
my wife Kaley Warner Klemp. She is my soul mate, my best friend,
and my partner in living full out.
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