CAMPING OUTSIDE THE MIND
An interview with a chicken:
Q: “Why do you chickens always want to cross my road?”
A: “Who’s askin’ a chicken? You people got all the brains!”
” I’m not askin’ any old bird, you’re smart enough, right? So I’m askin’ you to ponder deeply why you chickens cross roads… so really, why?”
“What’s a road?”
“This is a road, silly!”
“OH this! You call this a road? It’s my yard ! What the hell are you people doin’ on it?”
” Ah,crossin’ it to get…”
“Why do you people wanna cross my yard?”
Living an aware life is all about changing perspectives! It’s about living your life as it happens! J. Krishnamurti said: “ To understand what is needs swift awareness, for what is is not static.”
It’s curious how we humans create our own problems; how we insist that things stay the same. Or that things are – or should be – different than they are.
Of course, same or different, it’s all the same thought overlaid on a reality that may, or may not, conform to our ideas! It’s a little comedy/tragedy drama written, produced and directed by the mind, for the mind… “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” as Shakespeare pointed out over 500 years ago.
And so it goes, our human Stories do not bind us together, but separate and isolate us one from another. We live camped in the tents pitched in our private and collective minds. Of course, we cultivate some affinities – our loves and friendships with those who believe and value the same things as us. Indeed, those of us who huddle together around the same campfire for warmth and security, are always the “good” guys. The rest don’t get it – they get our hatred, our ignorance, our bullets!
Well, truth to tell, no mind- centered perspective of the “world” can bring us what we really want. And that really is peace. “A Peace that surpasses all understanding”. A mind-free, thoughtless loving that is always engaging not only with the mind of a separate other, but with the whole. With Self in the fullness of its infinite expressions.
Breaking camp, pulling up the stakes and collapsing those tents of the mind in which we are camped usually happens when events like Hurricane Grace blow through our positions! We begin to let go, to stop trusting the minds’ version of reality. We expand our horizon to the universal terra firma of truth; we cross to the other side –only to find there never was an “other” side!
