Follow the Bouncing Ball

If the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, what kind of lives are led by the volume of men?

In my hand there appears to be a wooden paddle with a red rubber ball attached with an elastic string. Over and over I hit the ball with the paddle and it never escapes the elasticity of the string. The propensity of a man to be hypnotized into nothingness is astounding.  Sometimes, when you try to go beyond the basic rote automatic get me through the day please Mr. please stuff, when you meditate and meditate and try to achieve a big picture spiritual understanding, you feel nothing, not nothing but that big empty nothing.  So I put the paddle down and go outside and take flat rocks and skip them endlessly across the small pond because that is what I do.  

Sometimes its different.  Like the other night.   I shouldn't call it just the other night, it should be the "Other" night and I should capitalize it and enshrine it and worship and and remember it forever and perform endless rituals trying to recreate it.   Yes, I should do that.  But I know I won't.   It was late at night, like around 2:00 a.m. and sometimes when I wake up then my consciousness is distinctly different in all sorts of disturbing ways.  But this other night was not at all disturbing and  my heart opened up and love spread out in all directions to everyone and I wondered why it couldn't always be like this and what prevented me from always living in this sea of compassion.  

 And then I woke up to those metallic balls lined up on a string striking each other over and over again and I thought this time the balls are truly a perpetual motion machine but then I noticed that each time the balls on the string struck each other they are slowly losing their force.   For try as they might the balls cannot escape the laws of inertia. Then the balls stop.   And I go to work.

They say if you meditate enough you will find peace and you will find harmony with you past.  But this is wrong.  For you don't  find your past.  Your past finds you.  And all those thing bubble up.  Like those mechanical birds attached to a lever that keeps swiveling down to the liquid and you think that they will go on forever kind of like a perpetual motion machine.  But they always eventually stop.  And you wish that there was some magic that would keep them going forever, but there is no magic.  Only inertia. And the silly mechanical birds with the silly hat with the bulb filled with liquid eventually stop just like the steel balls on the string.   And then you go to work again.

And then it becomes worse with the electronic games.  And I find the patterns in shiny objects of Candy and Soda and then I crush them over and over again.  And I think it will last forever and it will if I keep adding the 99 cent upgrades.  But then I put down the Candy Crush and I go back to meditating and the old memories keep coming.  And I feel like the token male in an all female bar and all the women don't want to dance with me, they want to dance with the louver and I can't say I blame them.