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.

Accidents and openings

My one-year-old son tips over a little space heater in the room and it lies there running until I set it up right again. Okay, maybe Child Protective Services will be calling, or the Fire Department: mea culpa. But once he's turned it upside down, I can see its bright orange heating element up inside the top of it, that I had never seen before. I remember once having half-wondered where the element was located and then instantly forgetting about it. Mistakes are openings. When an accident occurs and topples something out its ordinary place, no matter how grand or inconsequential, an opening occurs. And when we encounter openings, hollow spaces of little or nothing, we are encountering the opportunity to open up a little to ourselves. A little chance to wake up, the first subconscious whiff of coffee in the morning.

Imagination is cruel

That cruel gift, imagination, which allows us to envision a perfect world while we live in a world that seems so far from perfect, a world that cannot possibly match our lovely mental concoctions. And yet we persist in the cruel practice. We stubbornly lash ourselves bloody by measuring ourselves -- and others -- against our own imagined standards.

Man in Quotes!

Can there possibly be a more insulting thought – especially to an artist or cosmopolite -- than “I am just a product of my times, of my people, of the town in which I grew up. My thoughts are not my own, no matter how much I enjoy thinking so. I have culled them, consciously or not, from the thoughts of others, who in turn have gotten their thoughts from the minds of better thinkers.” In fact, what am I but a man in quotes?

Man in Quotes

We may believe in Truth, but Truth is not something we encounter by believing. It does not rest in faith or belief. Belief is nothing more than wish-fulfillment and childish fantasy. Cinderella for the girls, Napoleon or Jesus for the boys. And the gap between belief and action is nothing other than playacting, a mask placed on top of a mask. As if we were marionettes dancing in a puppet stage, and as our gaze traces its way up along our strings, we see our puppet master, who is himself another marionette.

Nondualism: Who Are You?

Watching yourself watching the world. Watching how clear plastic transparencies appear in front of your eyes, transparencies with pictures on them—pictures of your thoughts, your feelings, your past, your imagination. The transparencies rise up before your eyes and then disappear. They overlap, forming the strangest patterns, complex collages and yet still, only transparencies. And what is it that is looking at these transparencies, and looking beyond them. What is doing the looking? What is it that looks?