They say our friend Paula died in a freak accident. It wasn’t. There are no freak accidents. There are no accidents unless you call reality an accident. Accidents are the culmination of a series of moments. No, really they are just a moment. Too many moments are required to get to that moment to say any one thing, moment, or person is responsible.

For that matter, this blog post is a freak accident.

So, did our friend die, because she decided to buy a new Dodge and then met the man that would ask her out and then convince her to go against her better judgement and get on a motorcycle and not wear a helmet. Did the Dodge cause that?

What about the woman in the car that hit them? What moments and circumstances lead her to that moment. Maybe it was the distraction that caused her to change lanes in to them…

Where does fault truly lie? It doesn’t. Millions of factors go into any circumstance or moment. Our application of fault or cause is another component of our delusion.

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might
forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying
to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even
fought. The field reveals to a man his own folly and despair, and victory
is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury

The only crazy I have left is based on perceptions of others that only I perceive.

I am beginning to “see” myself attending more to the present. The remaining sticking points in my mind are those things that cause me emotions, that are related to how I perceive other people perceiving me. It’s liberating to realize that I can see where i am and where I will be.

We pigeon hole our lives and our “selves”. We are expected to have a career and stick with it, so for the most part we do. Then one day we realize we never got to be a dinosaur.

Just be.

Dinosaur
By Bruce Rogers

When he was very young, he waved his arms, gnashed the teeth of his massive jaws, and tromped around the house so that the dishes trembled in the china cabinet. “Oh, for goodness sake,” his mother said. “You are not a dinosaur! You are a human being!” Since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time that he might be a pirate. “Seriously,” his father said at some point, “what do you want to be?” A fireman, then. Or a policeman. Or a soldier. Some kind of hero. But in high school they gave him tests and told him he was very good with numbers. Perhaps he would like to be a math teacher? That was respectable. Or a tax accountant? He could make a lot of money doing that. It seemed a good idea to make money, what with falling in love and thinking about raising a family. So he was a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted that it made him, well, small. And he felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant, but a retired tax accountant. Still worse, a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curb, forgot to take his pill, forgot to turn his hearing aid back on. Every day it seemed he had forgotten more things, important things, like which of his children lived in San Francisco and which of his children were married or divorced.

Then one day when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling the familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching dragonflies flitting among the horsetails at the water’s edge.

http://www.flashfictiononline.com/f20090204-dinosaur-bruce-holland-rogers.html

My wife hasn’t ventured out into the water with me. She is ego dominated in almost every way and lives in deep pain at times. So, I wanted to see if I could plant a seed of realization and awakening.

I ordered a couple of copies of the book Loving What Is by Byron Katie. Her concepts are the same as all the mindful approaches in that their goal is the cessation of thought. She takes that approach by getting people to review the thoughts in their lives that cause the stress. By challenging the thoughts and breaking them down it helps people see that all belief in thought is useless.

My wife read the back cover of the book and thought it meant I was trying to accept a miserable life, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I told her as much and just asked her to read the book.

Her response today might as well have been coming from the girl in the Exorcist. “I was so aggravated and bored reading about that woman asking those questions, I couldn’t keep going. It just pissed me off. I stopped reading! How stupid!”

I told her that I appreciated her making the effort and to try again to just read it. Who knows… maybe a seed of awareness was planted in the dark shadows of her ego and we’ll see a mushroom grow or a flower bloom later because she’ll put the seedling out in the sun.

Seeing the ego in action like that is fascinating with awareness. Incredible to see it work.

I find that when my bags and jackets have a lot of pockets, I add more and more crap to them and weigh myself down with things I will likely rarely or never will need. This is true in life as well. The more things we have an interest in and the more things we try to occupy our minds with, the more we get bogged down, spread thin, and hopelessly lost in our thoughts. Its too easy to lose track of mindfulness, when you have 20 diversions for your mind. We think that all those pockets will make us better organized, but in fact they just make a bigger mess and more stuff that is disorganized. We have to learn to reduce the pockets in our life and focus on that which is most important – being aware of our racing monkey minds and being aware of our thoughts as they arise. When we reduce our pockets, we reduce our thinking and this in turn allows us to live enlightened existence.

I am finding that most of the texts I read about mindfulness pitch it to users as ultimately resulting in enlightenment, but we as humans are skeptical about religions promising great success. What I am beginning to understand is why they say not to pursue it. Pursuing it makes it an thought or idea for the brain. It makes it a human goal to attain rather than a mindful living. That is why pursuit kills the hope of enlightenment that really shouldn’t exist in the first place.

The message is to just be, but unfortunately that is impossible to “understand”, because when  we try to understand it is impossible to be. Its funny how it all starts to seep in or should I say become apparent as you progress on the path to nothing.

Those perplexing silly things that teachers say have a point, but you can’t express the point. So, the key is to observe the thoughts. Slow them via observation and not via thought. I am slowly seeing it permeate all of my thought processes. I still get angry and resentful and annoyed, but often its with myself. Neither is a good thing, but the fact that I do see it makes it all the more worth it to be “practicing”.

Practicing is just what we say it is. It means being being. Trying to be. Seeing and sensing presence and riding it.

I know. I know. Its all vague and silly sounding, but if you just stay with the fundamentals of knowing, being, and seeing that get repeated to you by one teacher after another, then you will start to “see”. I am just now starting to see more and its quite the relief.