We can’t learn to be who we are not, nor unlearn to be who we are. The only path is to learn who we are. Knowing who we are, our ‘original nature’, allows us to make the most of life with a minimum of wasted energy and time. I heard someone say recently, “don’t push the river, it’ll flow by itself.” I’d rephrase that a little, “We need not push the river, it’ll flow by itself”. Ruthlessly knowing our needs and fears helps with this by helping us know the benefit of resorting to no action.
Archive for the 'Brief' Category
The innate drive to have ‘fun’ is one of nature’s most effective hoodwinks. This drive allows man to catch a fish as it bites down on the bait seeking a moment of ‘fun’. Fun (pleasure) is also beneficial. If the fish didn’t enjoy the fun of eating it wouldn’t seek the food it needs to survive; the drive to have fun is balanced in nature. Not so in us! We carry with us thoughts of fun - desire - which tips the balance and we go after bait more than necessary. And the result is suffering, as Buddha pointed out. Thus, be extremely wary of wanting to have fun if you wish to live to be a wise old fish.
Words smell? Well not exactly. But, there is a clear similarity between odors and words. Simply put, words are to humans as odors are to dogs. And the same applies to beliefs. In the biological sense of things belief take place in our most developed organ - the brain. The olfactory sense of reality in dogs is the same, functionally speaking. Beliefs, rites, and rituals in our species serves as ‘odors’ in the larger social sense just as actual odors do in many (most or all?) social animals, e.g., rats, dogs, ants, etc. Need I say more? I think not. I’d just ’stink’ up the place.
Years ago, Luke and I fished a lot on the wharf. However, that kinda petered out. Not just ’cause the wharf was over-fished, but I knew that I could never top the whopper I caught in 2003!
The younger minds tend to perceive difference more readily. Like looking out at life’s experiences through separate windows. I expect this is just a symptom of neurological processes. An older mind’s ability to perceive similarities rests in that biology as well. As we age the mind’s billions of synapses continue to connect in more numerous and subtler ways. Wisdom is, after all, the ability to see ‘outside the box’ of instinctive reactions and impulses. Eventually, every older mind should see the thread running through the way.
Well, it is about time somebody stood up and said it! And perhaps many have. Coming out of the surf today I thought back to all the years I use to ‘hate’ swimming in the ocean. “I don’t like that salt water in my eyes”, I’d say. “I don’t like the sticky salting feeling on my skin”, I’d whine. Thinking and saying that nailed down a self fulfilled prophecy. How nice it is to have gradually returned to being an animal after all those years of believing I was a human. As words and names become simply sound in this animal’s ears, they have much less chance to get in my way.
In the fall of 2002, I took a physics class at Santa Cruz High School, and was loaned a textbook with an ID number of 32767. I realized that the giddy excitement I felt when I immediately recognized the number as equal to 215 − 1, or the largest value a 16-bit signed integer can hold, meant I might be a bit of a nerd.
—Luke
Biking back from the beach today we saw a helicopter on the soccer field. No one would play with it so off it went.
Splitting hairs and focusing on a split hair or two imparts ‘greatness’ to an ultra narrow field. This is like being a big fish in small pond. The folly here is that we infer that this ‘greatness’ exists beyond that small pond. It doesn’t. How ‘connected to the whole’ we feel is determined by our weakest link. Or perhaps our ’strongest’, as in ‘the world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly…’ and so on. Our strong side blinds us to our weak side, our Achilles heel.
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