When monkeys fly

The practice of meditation teaches us to watch the mind; to be the observer. “The Field and its Knower,” says the Bhagavad Gita.

My mind is haunted with so many threats, it's like a room full of caffeine-addled flying monkeys. It goes off at the least provocation, takes things personally, wonders if it's good enough, thinks it's better than its circumstances, has delusions of grandeur, squalor, indignation and magnanimity. It has an answer for everything. A scheme, a strategy, an idea, a plan.

The Knower is thinking of filing an indecency complaint with the Federal Communications Commission against the Field, just to catch a break. Before I knew the Knower, I identified entirely with the Field. It wasn't pretty. I hated my life so much, I consciously made one up. I was 17; pretended to be 25, a wandering writer, a chronicler of lives. The boyfriend died instead of dumping me. I was a beautiful, mysterious lone wolf sort of femme fatale, not a desperate, frightened kid with nowhere to go, much less a divine being with no need to go anywhere.

The Field continues to try to make up my life, while the Knower endeavors to live gratefully in the one that occurs each moment. I would imagine this level of awareness to be somewhere along the lines of learning the alphabet song in Tibetan monk school. Had I gone to Tibetan monk school, I might have been reading the Zen version of “The Lorax” by now. But I did not go to Tibetan monk school. I went to the School of Hard Knocks, where I learned to be defensive, frightened and egotistical.

Undoing one's life-long perception of the self is a chore. We go with what we know for a lot of reasons, not the least of which involves the formation of the brain.

Robert Fritz in “The Path of Least Resistance” describes the mind and the way it drives behaviors like water forming a river bed. Water flows on the path of least resistance. The mind functions likewise. Everything we learned to believe while our brains formed created the neurologic parallel of a watershed. How the water gets rerouted is an individual experience.

Eckhart Tolle, who woke up one day and was, Boom! enlightened, apparently had at his disposal the mental equivalent of the Army Corps of Engineers and all the manpower in China.

I seem to be working with a sand pail, a toy shovel and a flea circus.

This is not to compare my experience to that of Tolle, who sat on a park bench for a couple of years after his enlightenment and marveled at the coolness of it. Somebody has to go first and hold the door for the rest of us. But I do get frustrated with the antics of my mind and the annoying thoughts that get stuck in it like popcorn hulls.

Its flavor of the moment is to wonder if the deceiver I loved ever really loved me back. It would pollute the purity of my grief for the passage of my own love, which was genuine, deep and honest. It would have me feel like a fool for loving that way, when the Knower is grateful to have been able.

The Knower is Nanny Deb in a houseful of crazed toddlers, always leading them back to the quiet chair. There is no other strategy than mercy; no other approach than patience. Sometimes children will just be children, and thoughts will be flying monkeys. You let them act out long enough, they eventually calm down.

One can only hope.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

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