gyrmination

Admiration grows like wind, a competitive jealousy sets in, we are wrapped up in the warped race to outdo those who have outdone. Attention is focused, view is letterboxed into tiny panes stripped of context, senses convinced of some reality that parallels the limited one presented for our eyes to feast upon.

To me, ignorance is not the condition of lacking knowledge. It is a state of mind, closed to learning, closed to challenging experience. A kind of impatience. Just get on with the show, and let me do my thing.

You give me an impression that you eat slowly every time I see you. That’s cool. Enjoy each meal, and eat more.
Mina, Loveboat 2001

I am not efficient at such tasks as eating. Efficiency, streamlined, I am not. What is this karma that one inherits and passes on, another page of the self? Where is it to touch? Taste? Dispute or call to account? The karma in my tapping fingers, my flickering eyes, foreshortened breath, even-keeled saunter. Those non-essential things I do which yet I confuse with my identity. Habit energy. I do them so well without even trying.

Living now in this world I am beginning to understand them again. When I first returned I could not turn on the TV. The thought of sitting down to watch a movie seemed absurd; prerecorded music was banished from my aural space. Illusions to expand the mind which mostly make us dissatisfied with our connection to the world around us, want to seek some higher expression of it, greater perfections of it, of the body, of the company. Objectifying not only those things, but myself, so that I am but a shadow of the potential me. Eternally unfulfilled, dragging behind in the spotlight.

These thought processes become habit energies too. A miserable attempt to hide them, obvious to anyone looking. We never keep this karma to ourselves; we pass it on and on. And others pass theirs on to us. Most of the time a degenerative exchange. To deny the effect of this interaction is possible because we do not look. We idolize others and abuse ourselves. We have never met others and we have forgotten the rare occasions we met ourselves. We applaud through peepholes and condemn in person. First person.

I am not just contending with my own karma, it seems but that of everyone around me. If I cannot become enlightened in one fell swoop, the force of the collective karma of those surrounding me will crush me unless I retreat to my last stronghold.

I should meditate.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2005 at 01:57 and is filed under Rumination. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.