The Zen Guy, Ch. 14

A description of work:

"They are paying you to practice"

A description of play:

Practice in your free time while you are not at work.

A description of a sesshin:

"Its easy to practice at sesshin. The distractions have been reduced. Going back to your job, your family, the non-sesshin practice. That is difficult. That is where the rubber meets the road. But in a way, what could be more natural, more simple?"

 Life:

You are reading this.   Right now.   Are you still reading this?  What is coming next? Will there be more writing?  Will the sound of the typing in the cubicle across the hall continue?  The chatter of voices?  Or are you listening to your own internal dialog?   It is all that it is right now, ever changing.

A comment on what the Philosopher wrote yesteday:

Suffering is clinging to the internal dialog.   Practice is making wise choices with your internal dialog.  To study the self is to forget the self.  When you forget the self, there is more than the internal dialog.

A comment on what I ate over the weekend:

Barbecue.

A comment on what I drank over the weekend:

Wine and amazon energy drinks.  

A comment on what I should have drank over the weekend:

None of the above.

Take me to the river.  Let me float in the water.   Supported.   Back arching.   Sun through the trees:-)

The Philosopher, Ch. 3

Human's have an amazing ability to make shit up.   Not only to make shit up, but after they have made it up, they have an amazing ability to believe it, suppressing the knowledge that it was made up in the first place.

When society considers that your ability to make shit up to be out of the ordinary (or pathological) it considers it to be confabulation.   For example, in Contard's delusion, the person believes what they have made up about themselves in the extreme--believing that they are dead.  There is a documented case where a patient suffering from Contard's delusion believed he was dead so strongly that he actually starved.  

But what I'm getting at is the tendency toward a reverse form of Contard's delusion that we all share:  the belief not that we are dead, but that we are living.   This is a very practical and convenient idea.   Hard to do much of anything without it:-).   There are a mulitude of different perspectives on what constitutes life.   The biologists might say that we really are mostly a vast colony of bacteria in a host organism.   See "Things that Don't go Together,"  Supra at Ch. 7.   Though the belief that we are living has tremendous practical advantages,  it is still a belief-- perhaps no different than a belief that we are dead.

Like Cotard's, the belief that we are alive may be just as delusional or compulsive.  For in our belief that we are alive,  isn't there an internal narrative which we cling, a story we construct minute-by-minute to assure ourselves that we understand what is happening?  Sufferers of conditions like Cotard’s delusion may invent weird, nonsensical explanations for their reality because they are experiencing weird, nonsensical input. The only difference between these patients’ explanations and our own explanations is the degree to which they are obviously, verifiably false. Whatever explanations we manufacture at any given moment to explain our state of mind and body could be similarly muddled.   Whether or not your brain is damaged, your mind is always trying to explain itself to itself, and the degree of accuracy varies moment to moment.

Don't believe everything you think.  Even that you are just a big container of mostly bacteria:-)

Over on Yonder Montain, the dude with the Split lip bathes in the River sipping some very hot, by now, buttered rum.   Did you hear that it was 108 yesterday?