Often when sitting on the toilet during
morning ablutions it feels like a meditative state especially if one is not
straining hard and then resting for a while whilst the body completes its
evacuation procedure and then one feels the subtle gentle 'word feeling' it is
complete. Sometimes in that resting state between evacuation and complete
there is a gentle kind of rumination and it can inspire one with an Ah Ha and
wise counsel.
Whilst in the resting ruminating space I
found my mind getting sluggish and it felt as though it were empty and
meditative and it came to me it was a kind of dupe.
It felt as I were in a meditative state
yet it was a sluggish kind of drowsy ruminative emptiness, it was apparent
there was little thought but it was a kind of slow turnover which could lead to
a low feeling bordering depression, it was a sinking feeling and I could then
feel the ego which to me is the past accumulation of life to this point and its
experiences all collected into a ‘box set’ which had the ability to enliven any
of its contents as if it were the present and so fool the awareness by usurping
it and make it feel as though it were the reality now, the pasts attempt to
live always in the present.
As my
awareness kicked in and I became conscious of the moment I realised what was
happening, I had become unconscious of the now and in true emptiness and the
fake past had conjured up a scenario which was as follows; it was unhappy it
searched for some thing to do to occupy itself, the ego that is the box set has
to keep thinking to validate its existence because it knows at the depth of
itself it is just memory that can juxtapose, manipulate, conjugate and compute
in thousands of configurations the experiences to fit most events and produce
fantastic graphics and presentations.
The
realisation came when there in this lethargic state and I realised that just
before going to the bathroom and getting out of bed, I had a lethargy that
dragged me back to getting up; what’s the use you've done it all made the
T-shirt, done the trip, bought the ticket the whole darn lot the ‘megillah’ (a
slang Yiddish word used now often in every day language meaning a long drawn
out story) and so it was searching for something to do, go somewhere, read a
book, research, blog, watch a sporting event, eat, look for a movie, meditate
it could not find anything to satisfy it, prove that it was alive, because it
knew at the very essence of itself it was just clever manipulated memories,
covering the awareness and usurping it from time to time and feared the true
emptiness which would means its annihilation.
So I was saved
from the past endeavouring to be my reality and future and the awareness led me
to a sharp clear dynamic awareness and all lethargy gone, brain fog gone and if
given into perhaps a kind of senility and dementia. I realised in that moment how is easy it
would have been to slide down that slope of foggy misty dull rumination and get
lost in the ‘clouds’ of delight, hate, oblivion, in fact anything than face the
now and its apparent emptiness and yet the true emptiness is salvation.
Salvation from the past repeats, from boredom and also the terrible feeling
that accompanied the dullness at one point ‘the brain'. The mind squeezing
itself, it actually physically felt as if I were contracting the brain, my
skull to ooze out something in order to escape the now and its apparent
emptiness and come up with an exciting ‘something to do, to occupy my mind’.
The paradox is
that; the ego detests boring and sterility and needs constant chatter to know
it exists, it is scared of emptiness because it sees emptiness as oblivion or
at the very least boring, depressive and a waste of time when it could be
doing. Yet when the awareness kicks is
in, which is the natural state of the mind, there is happiness, joy, peace, tranquillity
and all is well and I feel the ego might somewhere, somehow enjoy this as well. The strength of constant habit brought about
by constant repetition to become crushed to a solid mass which is ego and so an
entity split off from awareness, a being formed by the weight of constant
impounding routine rote and ritual that it is almost a monumental and gigantic
task to break its foothold. The gift of
grace or glimpses of awareness can be a blessing and like the weather wearing
down rock, the sea water and waves battering the shore and cliffs cause them to
wear down, the rivers that cut deep gauges so we might wear away the ‘hard rock
of ego’ such was the gift of this mornings toilet event, not only elimination from
the body but some of the ‘mind content as well’.
SHACK
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