From the outside it looks like "just do it"

18 Oct, 2026

"Before Enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment chop wood, carry water" Zen Haiku¹

Applied to overcoming compulsions, I hear often that "final" overcoming is just, not doing it anymore. Hard to elaborate more, as the "final" transformation is the one that should be the more obvious, just don't do it. Or just do it.

Of course, no FINAL final transformation could exist.

Point being, to arrive at just "do or don't" there's a journey. What needs to happen for one to arrive at the solution that you can just do or don't?

We're loosing a framing. Compulsion. Overcoming compulsion implies a victory of the spirit over the biology of the body or the chaos of the mind². Say I want to stop drinking coffee because I noticed patterns of thought that make me feel like I'm slipping into an addiction. The addiction lives in the default behavior; routine, deeply ingrained into my mind and body as normal. I can watch videos about coffee addiction, I can do research about it and arrive at a logical conclusion that I should not drink coffee. But I still want coffee, my mind and body still want to, no matter how much my spirit insists.

Why would I wait until I feel like not drinking coffee? Some part of me could be very happy, glad of tricking myself into an already won battle; I write as I slip my cup of coffee.

The act of moving the question from "do I feel like it" into "do I have/want to do it" strips of power the compulsion. It feels wrong and daunting to do so because it gives the spirit a chance of winning for real, and a chance of losing³. But it also triumphs the flawed framing by bypass. From the outside, once this is done it looks like half the battle is already won.

I won't fool myself into believing that this is easy. Where is the line between thinking about moving your finger and actually moving it? So many hours lost in the bathroom figuring out that⁴. Thinking hard enough about it is not enough, there's a different type of signal or thing in the works. The part of you that thinks and pictures is different from the part of you that moves. Like a pilot and a robot. Thinking hard enough about doing or not is not the same as moving the dials and such. Where does the line exists⁵?

Asking because I can't pretend to already be there. I can't pretend to just do or don't. There's the ideal "do it" mindset, clear as an objective. I can act like it, for a while, before slipping and brewing another coffee by instinct. The long term objective is to slowly move towards that, but that does feel like slowly thinking harder into the right kind of thought. Huh?

I'm wrong. Its not harder. Its lateral. No amount of hard thinking will reach do or don't.

Its another kind of thought.

Yup. Sorry. I still don't understand do or don't. No new knowledge can be gained here.

I can say this though, I've been thinking about this post for some hours before writing it, clearly different from the action of writing it here. Maybe there's such a thing as thinking and doing in thought realm? Thoughts that are more thoughts and thoughts that are more actions. Thought terminating is an example - the ability to stop thinking about coffee.

#thoughts