It all boils down to fear, doesn’t it? We are all – all of us – walking around terrified. Afraid of people, afraid of parents and teachers and institutions, afraid of our bosses, our loved ones, and all of us afraid of the future. We’re terrified of living our lives, and just as terrified of not living them.

And yet, most of us won't admit it. We don’t admit that we’re afraid. Some of us pretend we’re not really afraid of everything. We hide our fears, sit down on top of them and hope they don’t move, hope people don’t see them. And sometimes, if we’re really good at hiding our fears, we begin to forget where we put them -- we hide them even from ourselves. Since we can’t find them, we forget they’re there and forget we’re afraid. Nevertheless, we are sitting on our fears, concealing our fears, wrapped in fears that we are afraid to acknowledge. We are afraid of fear itself.

After I’ve been searching all over the house for my keys, after I’ve cursed and muttered and fretted, and then I finally find the keys, I feel a slight, almost imperceptible . . . disappointment. The anxious search, the excited rush, the fascinating problem is over. In this same way, would I also rather search for Reality rather than actually recognizing it? Is the chase more exciting? Do I feel that I do not deserve to recognize it? If I find the keys, I have to question the part of me that believes I am a loser of keys. If I find Reality, I destroy the “important” and habitual part of me that believes I cannot find it. Then where will all the drama go?

Things constantly move and change and change again. Mutability. Poets around the world have different names for the same phenomena of constant change, for moments that are transient, mutable, impermanent, ephemeral, evanescent. Poems about mutability are tinged with sadness, the pang of loss. Something beautiful was here, for a moment, but now it is gone. The constant motion is not only outside but also inside of you. The sparrow overhead may gently startle you, making your heart jump. The clouds passing overhead may introduce feelings of awe. As you open up to receive this, you have created space inside of you, your emotions begin to move more freely, in concert with the actions swarming around you. In fact, what’s inside of you seems as much a part of everything as the things outside of you. Your emotions reflect what’s going on outside.

Transience

The ancient yogis’ first concern was to find something beyond transience. Something permanent, constant, and dependable. They knew well that constant change was painful. It was also horrifying. If everything, all of living and dying was flux, if nothing ever stood still, then everything was little more than a vertiginous swirl, aperspectival madness, sound and fury signifying nothing. Life was meaningless chaos. So the yogis aim was to transcend the violent flux, to expand beyond it, to grow bigger than it and maybe even, finally, hold it within themselves the way a big bowl holds a beaten egg.
But the Buddhists went the other way around transience. Or not around it – straight down into it. They didn't set out to rise beyond transience, not to transcend and include it, but to fully feel it. Not to surpass it, but to recognize how they were part of it, to feel the molecules moving around in their bones, to chew on the gristle, to swallow that big wiggling fish whole.

Mind

The mind is a paltry thing

an echo chamber

blowing around

the empty husks

of words

No big deal

If God is everything and everywhere, and this very everything and everywhere is therefore sacred, then what’s so special about it? Anything that is all pervasive, like the air we breathe, is as ordinary as can be. So why all this darned fuss about God? Big deal, last night you saw God? Do you see me running around ecstatically, shouting “Today my lungs breathed a thousand gallons of air!”

Fear ... Desire

As a man’s fears are big, so are his desires.