Andy's Mind

While meditating recently I observed how fragile is my mind’s stability and how easily it is distracted, how little it needs to produce mountains of thoughts and images. It’s just like fireworks, a little spark ignites a myriad of flashes and booms.

I sit. I hear a sound. My mind immediately recognizes it, names it in a flash so fast I can’t grasp it yet alone prevent it – it’s a car door being slammed. Rapidly, sets of images appear, various situations in which I slammed a car door. Or seen a door slammed. Or saw it in a movie. Then the mind ticks and stops on a memory. Now the thoughts tree is almost developed, I recall a situation, a smell, a feeling. But, the breathing continues and I go back to it. The image slowly dissipates, the mind becomes clear again.

(more…)

People say often: “things could be better” or “he could do better” or, even worse, “I could do better”. Then, they get depressed.

But in fact things are always exactly as they could. And everyone does exactly as they can, at that moment, in that time. Maybe things would be different some day, but they would never be better than they could. Or worse.

Isn’t it obvious? Didn’t you know it all the time? The world just is. The world just flows. And so do we.

Today I had the opportunity to hear Jakusho Kwong Roshi speak. Amongst other things he mentioned briefly digital age we are now and observed, that we as humans are being reduced to objects. I agree, we become objects that can be quantified by numbers – I wrote about this already in the context of hiring. But, why we even think it is possible to describe a human being with a set of numerical, processable parameters? Where did we get this idea in the first place?

(more…)

While I sat zazen yesterday the battle with thoughts begun again. Then, after a long while, I realised that in fact it’s not thoughts I’m against, it’s my internal judge. It’s a process of my mind which is there all the time evaluating my sitting and reprimanding me for not doing it right. I know this part of me pretty well, it comments most of what I do in the same way. No one can judge my actions harsher than part this part of my ego. But once I realized it and focused on relasing my judgements, once I denied them energy it all became much easier.

I won’t go as far as to say that I won or that meditation is a breeze now. Nothing of this kind. But I’m just a tad, a bit closer to just sitting. A bit closer to waking up.