Month: January 2011

Just found out something interesting with this thing call feelings. It brings out what seems separate into one, thus making a person identify with what he or she is experiencing. It has the nature of making thoughts real. It has the similar effect of making what is 2D into 3D experience. It gives flavour to the experience. It makes the experience exaggerated and hence magnifies its meaning as if the object becomes a part of the experiencer.

Whether it is pleasant or unpleasant feelings, the experience will feel glued to the object it is experiencing. If I love someone, the feeling I get is that the other person seems to have a deep connection with me and I will like that feeling to stay on, making me one with it. Of course nothing actually occurs on the other side – even if there is, that experience is his or hers, and has never crossed her border over to mine. It is all happening in my field and since that person has come into my sense of pleasure, I have taken for granted that this person is mine, irrelevant whether I take the initiative to approach or not to approach that person. It has already infused as an idea in my mind. Hence I will find it difficult forgetting the person and if it becomes a discomfort to bear, I will take the next step of bringing the person closer into my fold, by scheming my way to it. And if I am an introvert, I will have to bear with the suffering of not taking the initiative to approach. In both ways, there is already an incepted fusion of idea in the mind, that the person is “for me”.

On the same note, if I dislike a person, making my feeling unpleasant, I have no doubt, brought what seems to be two into one – like trying to separate two objects glued together. No matter how hard I try getting the person out from my mind, I will find it difficult, if not impossible, as that is the nature of unpleasant feelings. It is because I have already made him or her as an incepted idea in my mind that I will have difficulty removing it. Again nothing actually occurs out there, except what is really happening in the mind of the beholder. That is why it has been said there is no such a thing called enemy, except the meaning of enemy found within those who think about it.

In truth pleasant or unpleasant feelings are experiences based on our ideas about the world, rather than the world itself. We are attached to our ideas rather than the world, be it a person or a thing. I can’t love anyone, except loving the idea of the person for his character or whatever. And I can’t hate anyone except hating the idea, found in me, of that person. Hence I am playing my own game all the time. No wonder the experience seems to be glued, as it has never left me! Darned!

Hence can I really love anyone? Yes, only at the mind level where I take my brother and sister as one, seeing them as not separate from me. This non-separation is a realization compared to the imitation version of what feelings seems to do when it merges two into one. One is a realization and understanding, whereas the other, an illusion of form.

I dream of coming home
where I will no longer be played by the past
or the future
not even the present.

I dream of coming home
where love is not what I think it is
where acceptance is no longer a question
where wisdom is all I am.

I dream of coming home
where mirror has no reflection
where opposites does not exist
where duality unheard.

I dream of coming home
where you and me is no more an error
where right and wrong never were
where separation is impossible.

I dream
that I am no longer dreaming
and that what is real is simply unreal
and what is unreal simply inexistence
for what lies
is simply… minusing “I dream”.

It is indeed inconceivable to the extent what the mind can achieve – a molten pot of amazing and ridiculous ideas and views. It is of no wonders without wisdom, seeing an end to it is rather impossible. As I sat one day in meditation, observing how it jives with itself with whatever ideas that came out in the present moment, it became a little more obvious to me how powerful what the force of the mind can do. At that moment the mind likens to me a metaphor of a huge unimaginable unit of data bank, accepting and rejecting whatever idea that meets its criteria, depending on whatever belief system it had previously stored in it.

With such immense combinations and permutations of views accumulated life after life, it is of little wonder how we can’t get out from our fixated ideas that easily, save with wisdom. I was sharing a book A Thousand Names for Joy by Byron Katie with a fellow practitioner which I felt would have been helpful to him in his practice as it had been for me in tremendously disentangling a certain way I look at my ideas. The feedback I got a few days later was not encouraging, which was surprisingly to me as just a little over a year ago, another practitioner expressed profusely with thanks how amazing this particular book was to him and how it has helped him open up to his practice in new ways he has never seen before. It is indeed interesting to observe the difference between perceptions working.

A book, or for that matter, any teachings, can be seen from the perspective of a thousand ways through the lenses of our convoluted ideas and views, though in simplicity, what is required is merely a simple way that needs no complexity and difficulty to perceive. I remember reading another book by Jed McKenna who mentioned about how simple the Truth is and yet it is indeed boggling how the mind can’t get around seeing it at all until it gets it. Obviously the web of delusion can be so dense, that it is in-penetratable until a wise teaching which resonates with the mind comes along in undoing it. Such is the ignorance of the mind.

No one knows and no one can really tell, which or what teachings can be a corrective and appropriate tool for him or her in undoing the mind considering that in such dense delusion, a gradual awakening is necessary. As such, no one tool can be said useful all the way, depending on which level the person is in. At a certain given time, devotional practices can be necessary; at another time, effort; and yet at some given time, wisdom. Hence to judge one’s practice to another can be sheer ignorance as we can never tell where the person is, not to mention ours.

Hence to be mindful of ourselves, on how the mind works, without making a quick conclusion about it, helps us to develop a little more compassion towards our kindred spirits who have come together to practise towards the path of total emancipation.