Month: September 2016

you know what’s funny?

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chill-its-only-chaos

Everything.

Seriously.

Everything is such a ridiculous miracle, from sex and birth to humanity, to chasing money, to jobs, to chasing others.

Living on a big ball of dirt and water that stays together because of gravity (whatever that is), flying through a vacuum of space so big we can’t even begin to comprehend, around a giant torch of nuclear power.

On this wet rock we fight each other, arguing and even killing because someone is too different or we think we don’t have enough stuff. We fear losing it all, when we know that we are definitely going to lose everything in the end.

We take it so seriously.

And that’s the cosmic joke.

#BuddahWisdom

In just 5 minutes

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fear-and-laothing-in-sesame-street

My stomach rumbled and I thought about angel hair pasta tossed with some shaved garlic and onion, and some extra virgin olive oil and tangy capers. A few sweet cherry tomatoes from my garden, cooked in a skillet until they break apart into a sauce to saute the whole thing. I needed to get some onions though…I could do that on the way home from work, but I’d need to swing by-

I snapped myself out of the future and back to the present.

It’s been several weeks since I’ve meditated, and I can feel it. The problem with stopping meditation is you can’t save your progress: Your clarity and awareness immediately and swiftly starts fading.

It’s like letting your kitchen go if you don’t clean it for a week. Your brain fills up its pathways with garbage thoughts, regrets, forward-looking fears, imagined transgressions and pitfalls and enemies. The pathways get jammed up. Temper is more sensitive to being triggered.

It’s scary, actually, to see how easily how temper can be swayed. It’s scary to see how you can acclimate to all the garbage that’s cluttering your mind.

Your judgment is affected, but you can’t tell, because you’ve adapted to it.

So using one session to calm your mind down to a steady state is almost impossible. You’ve let your mind wander without supervision for weeks or months. You’ve left the gates open, so it’s gonzo, far away by now. It’s going to take some effort to find it again, to find your calm center that’s not contaminated by your environment.

And yet…that 5 minute session of stopping and focusing on your breath is so powerful that immediately afterwards, I notice the change. It’s clear something happened in my head, although during those minutes I felt like I was trying to tame a wild horse, and it was bucking me every 5 seconds!

Be vigilant against the drift of the mind. Don’t habituate to that noisy place…or to any place, unless you want to. Whatever negative place you drift into through habit…realize you don’t have to be there. It isn’t normal, so don’t make it your normal.

Today, I’ve taken back some control. And tomorrow I must go back and exercise my mind again. I cannot be a victim of my mind, or the random circumstances of life. Because a life out of my control is not my life at all.

Who are you throwing your vote away on again?

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people-power
Well, Republican Party, what have you got to say for yourself? You’ve left half the US population with no one to throw their vote away on to keep the status quo going.
 
They could throw their vote away on Gary Johnson, but he’s too liberal on issues of the religious right and too open-minded with providing unemployment compensation.
 
So we get another career politician who knows how to bend the rules but not break them, if not for her country, at least for herself.
 
But how can we blame the Parties?
We vote your people into office.

The politics of your Self

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Twitter bird singing on branch

You see, you are not educated to be alone.

Do you ever go out for a walk by yourself? It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree—not with a book, not with a companion, [not with your social media] but by yourself—and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fishermen’s song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind.

If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which no government can tax, no human agency can corrupt, and which can never be destroyed

Acknowledgments:

Jiddu Krishnamurti