Tag: mind

If you do one thing today, open your hand and heart and let go of whatever you’re holding onto. What we want is happy to go, what we need arises without desire.

The only possible place to get to, the only attainable perspective, the only condition one simply cannot help experiencing is the present moment whatever it is, however it is.

There is nothing to be done but see ourselves clearly. With this clear recognition, what happens next is what happens next regardless of what we may want.

Therefore, I do not view the self as an improvement project that begins with incompletion and evolves towards completion. The chaos does not need to be ordered. The entropy does not need to be reduced. The demons do not need to be tamed. The jagged edges don’t need to be smoothed out.

— Shiv Sengupta

If I am constantly on the move, tripping, going from here to there and back again, then I am in a restless state, hanging on to the outer rim of the wheel. I will seek relief from this mental foment in experiences of pleasure. But, of course, no pleasure lasts for long; it invariably yields to the restlessness that creates the desire for pleasure in the first place. Where, then, is my release from pain? Nowhere else but at the centre of the wheel. Where there are no distinctions. Where indifference to one is indifference to the other.

Rest-less

A day off today between a twelve hour shift yesterday and another one tomorrow. In my old job this would have depressed me greatly but these days I couldn’t feel better about it. Such is the profound magnitude and good fortune to have work that you love. Work that is somehow an extension or expression of who and what you are. And often we don’t know who and what we are until the work allows us to express ourselves. A chicken and egg situation but such is life.

Today will be spent contemplatively, outside in nature, inside with coffee and perhaps an invigorating run down by the river later. But mostly in gratitude for, well, everything really. 

It is pure fantasy to think that you could have done things differently or lived your life any other way.

This dream of an imagined past feeds an equally unhelpful delusion of the future in which you consciously learn and strive to change ‘yourself’ and do things differently.

All of these behaviours and activities happen, of course, but not as the result of conscious so-called will but automatically and spontaneously from our unconscious.

We do what we do when we do it whatever our conscious awareness may declare to the contrary.

Our thoughts and ideas are the least of us. Always late to the party that’s already in full swing, uninvited yet full of their own self importance and righteousness. Taking credit for everything and responsibility for nothing.

There is nothing wrong with mind. Mind is completely perfect in every respect except for thinking there is a separate you that possesses the mind and persists in wanting it to be different, which is impossible.

Previously I posted here about my soft spot for Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman. On further reflection it occurred to me that one of the reasons it resonates so strongly with me as an adult (having first fallen for it as a young child) is it embodies a romance of the (American) open road.

In my youth I was lucky enough to fulfil my adolescent dream of driving across North America (east to west) and travel back (west to east) via Greyhound.

Looking back on those memories I can barely detect the boundaries delineating the reality of it from the dream of it. Such is the unreliability of the mind when it comes to certainty about anything. Perhaps it is in this liminal zone, prone to suggestion, that our unconscious emerges unbidden presenting us with desires and aversions of which we were previously unaware or had forgotten.

Wasn’t it Jung (of course) who once said:

What you resist persists.

It comes as a great relief to realise that you could not have lived your life in any other way despite all the reasons and stories you tell yourself about how things could have been different.

They weren’t different because they weren’t.

The degree to which we think our conscious awareness has control and agency over our actions is greatly overstated.

Indeed I would go as far as to say what we think are choices and decisions are pure fantasy applied after the fact to instantiate a sense of a separate, autonomous entity of selfhood.