It is easy to sit still, Buddhist Nones/nuns and key monks or Monk keys do it for a living, right? The best way to overcome procrastination is sitting still. All of a sudden anything is more important and has to be done. Drains need cleaning, elderly relatives visiting and e-books need listening. Come to think of it isn’t running a form of meditation? Maybe we should go to the Himalayas to meditate properly? Less distractions? Surely we do not bring the distracted mind with us everywhere? There is no escaping our own thoughts, pah, a likely story! Maybe a nice cup of tea is a form of tea meditation?
And then you sit. You sit because it is your new solution. You sit like you have a poker up your ass. With some droning app. Too tight. So you relax and doze off. You focus on the breathing, to develop your concentrated awareness. The mind has other ideas. Oh the memories, oh the plans for holidays in a meditation retreat. Oh the delightful fantasies of being a Buddha and saving the world. This is your mind? Take it away. Nothing but an internet of cute cats.
Defeat is not an option. It is my mind. I am the master of my destiny. Back to Mx Cushion sitting ... This dear reader is not a mind. It is an explosion in a twaddle factory. It is a minestrone soup with every known shape as pasta and croutons from hell. I will not sit with this idiot pastafarian, I and I. These thoughts, where have they come from? It can not be me, it can not. Away. Away. Holy Mary mother of all that is fine and rosary, pray for us now in our moment of need. Come to think of it Catholicism now there is a fine religion … come to think of it Voodoo/Santería is quite catholic these days. Or dancing with nymphets through the Pagan woods, surely that is more enlightening?
Help.
And you sit and you observe and find out what a mess you are. You are no more insane than the other streaming members of techno society. You help your landlady take out the garbage Mr Anderson. Where is the holy Trinity when you need her? Not even the gods can save us from Mx Cushion. I think I may have taken the wrong pill.
Where is the exit back to the mindless Matrix?
And you sit. You sit to find out the source of this mind possessed by every stray piece of flotsam, TV jingle and media meme. After all we are trying to find our self. To wake up to the real nature of our being. So clearly there must be a soul, a person thinking and imagining and sensing every stray sound from heart beats to coughs. Yet there is not.
Oh the humanity.
Every sense of being, every moment of mindless drivel is dependent on a meal one ate, a song one sang, a memory, a fantasy. The Buddhists call it arisings, dependent origination. There is no self. I need to sit down. Where is Mx Cushion when you need her/hymn ...
I am not a number, I am a person but oh calamity, the person is just a number of arising factors. OK where is the Buddhist PDF reader? Let me check this out. The Buddhas they say, there is no self. Noooo! [screams echo into cyberspace]. Who is that maniac with all the crazy garbage. There must be someone at the centre. A sort of soul. A sort of essential being.
The Awakened Ones, they say no. Oh Buddha and Bodhisattvas!
Dear readers, fellow travelers, sangha and new age wannabes, I am defeated. There must be some mistake. If there is no central I, what can it be that awakes to be a Buddha? Somebody has spiked the ambrosia. Why did no one warn me that being awake was impossible, there is nothing and no one to awake. I feel such a fool or maybe I don’t. Mx Cushion don’t think I have finished with you yet. Gonna sit on your face. Oh I am determined now. Somebody is gonna pay for this mix up, this non event and it is not going to be me because I don’t exist …
… to be discontinued …