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.

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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 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.

There is no fulfillment later in life. Ever.
There is no later in life. Ever.
There is only now.

What you are waiting for is here.

My wife is going through tremendous physical discomfort right now as she is 6 months pregnant and has nausea throughout. She has a tendency to experience a great deal of illness and pain when not pregnant as well and it has in the past aggravated me to a great extent. She has also had bouts with depression as many people do in this world.

Today she had what we would call a hissy fit – twice. She took out on me her hypersensitivity and tendency to get overly stressed about any issue. Her attachment to emotions is very strong and it comes out in a very emotionally violent manner.

When I can see what is happening, I want to engage her. First I want to defend my ego by fighting back against her. Then, I have begun to be able to stay calm and not react to her and I can see her ego rise into an even greater frenzy and getting angrier. I try not to show emotion or reaction in my non-reaction, but I never fail to be amazed at how rapidly she is capable of exploding into venomous anger. My silence accelerates that. If I try to just speak calmly to her at the moment, then that too explodes the situation. I have to allow her to ride it out. but it is I can tell you exceedingly difficult to do.

It’s always been pretty easy for me to move on from my emotions. I should say, easier than it seems to be for most people in my life. I’ve always been able to see that time spent on emotion is wasted. That is not say that I do not have my times of stress, compulsion, addiction, insecurity, etc. etc. etc. I have plenty and still do often, but now that I am more able to see my emotions, it is becoming easier to watch them float away than it was before for me. While this is a tremendously freeing thing to see and develop in life, it also can make it more difficult to interact with others. This is especially true for those I am close too, that are obsessed with their emotions, stress, and thinking and believe they have absolutely no control over any of it. Its difficult to interact without confusing or frustrating them, because it is so much easier to “move along” from our thoughts and emotions.

This has always been a frustrating quality for friends to understand. They feel like you don’t care about the big important emotions and moments that they care about, but in fact it just seemed pointless to waste energy on things I could not changed and/or that had already passed.

Certainly I won’t stifle the awakening, but it throws me off to see that happening. In addition, I find I am telling less white lies and sharing more things off the cuff than i would have previously. Again, in the normal mode of life operation, this can cause problems, but the benefits far outweigh as long as i try to be as compassionate as possible without the normal delusion within which I used to act.

My wife is the person that I am speaking about and tonight we had a moment where it was painfully evident what was happening for me. She has a tendency to turn everything that happens into a BIG problem that is ongoing. We have a 2 year old son and a baby girl on the way and I want them to sense I what they can be if they awaken and so I don’t want the negative influence over their day to day existence, but I “love” my wife and would never consider a different environment for them. So, I guess I will move along from hear and do the best I can in this moment.