Pride and Vanity

I wonder how to reconcile my vanity, my conscious attention to my appearance, with my inner observer.
I have often though that vanity was necessary, simply to present others with a more pleasant experience when interacting with me. But now I wonder, because if that beauty is not appreciated, but rather offends others, or makes them feel inadequate, I have only glorified myself at someone else's expense.

And I cannot lie: I like to feel like I look good. I am proud of my looks.
Mary, one of the Bennett sisters in Pride and Prejudice, remarks, "Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
Can the answer be as simple as pride is good and vanity is bad?
Perhaps, but I feel that I must explore it more. There are occupations, for instance, where, as part of one's duties, one must maintain a certain appearance. The appearance of a politician, for example, is a necessity for his/her message to be heard.
But even this vanity probably should be avoided for the benefit of society. If a politician affects an personality that cannot be reconciled with his true personality, the public would not be best served by electing based on that image.
On a personal level, I do think that vanity without pride can be dangerous. The mixture can lead to a sneaky path of self loathing while one is being showered with adoration by others.
Ultimately, I think vanity is self-defeating. Too much attention to vanity can often either undermine one's pride, by tying it to validation received by others, or reveal itself as insecurity to others, which is rarely the appearance that one wants to affect.
Perhaps, the ultimate answer is to cultivate pride in one's self, and let appearances take care of themselves. Perhaps, others will actually think the best of you when you think the best of yourself. This approach certainly sounds much easier than monitoring every outfit, every conversational response, and all body language during interactions. I hope I can rely on my innate laziness to guide me towards this easier path.

Active Practive vs. Wei-Wu-Wei

As an Taoist, I like to follow Wei-Wu-Wei in my life. Doing things without trying so hard to do them seems like a much easier way to live. And I like doing things the easy way.

But the principle of active practice seems in direct opposition to the principle of Wei Wu-Wei, which is based on not actively thinking about a task to achieve the best possible.

In order to reconcile these two philosophies, I think it is important to differentiate between practice and performance. I have noticed in tennis, I may try to push myself during practice - pushing when I have limited energy, trying for tricky shots, and actively attempting to change up the pace and direction of rallies as much as possible. 

But in tennis matches, if I think too hard about what I am doing, I find myself going for harder shots too often, and forcing myself into errors. I have to rely on an empty mind to give me the right attitude of playing the appropriate, high-percentage shot.

Further, putting myself in an automatic mode is a necessity for escaping the emotional upheaval that occurs during a match. I let the silent observer consume me, and sometimes even feel that I am watching myself in third person as I play my matches. This is when I play the best.

I postulate this: that practicing using our cognitive mode increases our autonomous level of skill, but that the two are not equivalent or even comparable. The cognitive mode is not associated with a level of skill at all, except for the skill of being in the cognitive mode. It is the autonomous level of skill that is the true upper bounds for our skill at any given time. 

To summarize, a quote from the Steven Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching:

"We work with being,
but non-being is what we use."

Getting Good

I think it is inherently virtuous to get good at things: We have come into possession of these bodies and minds, and use them to fullest of their abilities honors our own existence.

This morning I read a piece from Moonwalking with Einstein (a book on the art of memory), that made me think deeply about the notion of practice. Now I am struggling to reconcile two notions: that quality of practice or that quantity of practice matters more.
The author, Joshua Foer, flatlines in his pursuit of memory skills at a point he calls the "OK Plateau." A person  goes through three different states of practice when learning a new skill

1. The cognitive stage - where you learn strategies and actively think about putting them to work
2. The associative stage - where you become more efficient at using the strategies
3. The autonomous stage - where you are no longer thinking actively, and "running on autopilot"

Foer mentions psychological studies that postulate that once a person has gotten good enough at a task, they slip into an autonomous stage, and stop actively trying to get better. Thus, if one could stay in the cognitive phase, there would be no limit on how good a person could get.
Further, Foer mentions that the amount of practice only loosely correlates with skill, and that the quality of practice matters much more.

But this seems in opposition to the notion of 10,000 hours, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. The idea is, basically, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve a master level in something.
Let me first say, I have not read Outliers, so I cannot claim a full understanding of any ideas that Gladwell put forth in his book. But I wanted to mention it because I was so disheartened when I learned of this statistic, and figured that my idea of becoming a renaissance man was potentially unattainable, because of the time constraints on every aspect of life I wished to get good at.
Foer has shed a slim beam of hope on my dream. The notion that through active concentration on improvement, one can compress the time necessary for mastery, suggests that as long as I let my natural curiosity guide me towards deeper understanding of the things I want to get good at, as long as I challenge myself with new tasks that are increasing in difficulty, I can master everything I want to get good at.

The Silent Observer

I have arrived at my current model of my consciousness from various readings. I started with instruction from the late Sathya Sai Baba - a model with four elements:

1. Senses

2. Mind

3. Intellect

4. Atma

The intellect should follow the Atma, the mind should follow the intellect, and the senses should be used by the mind. 

I think this model is very useful, and comparable to Freud's model of 

1. Ego

2. Superego

3. Id

Where the senses are not included as an aspect of consciousness. 

I strive to better understand my Atma, because this is the deepest and most mysterious part of me. I like the terminology Ellie Roozdar uses in describing a "silent observer," which I feel is roughly equivalent. At any given time, it watches, without judgement, the actions of the intellect, mind, and body. 

Through meditation - which I take to mean stopping the actions of the mind and thoughts of the intellect - I believe we can better hear the nothingness emitted by the silent observer. And by using this nothingness, this absence, to guide our actions, we can arrive at a state of non-action. 

Therefore, I use the voice of this observer, who does not speak, to not-say my non-thoughts. And I hope that they all make as much non-sense as this post does.