We’d all like to be happy, wouldn’t we, to have joy in our lives, to be light-hearted like children. We have acquired so many ideas and feelings about ourselves. We burden ourselves so much with ideas of who and what we are, how we get accepted and loved. So much of our thinking is about survival. Somebody asked me “what does meditation do for you?” I said “Meditation makes me see how I needlessly make myself unhappy and, consequently, make other people around me unhappy”. I often have to laugh at my own nonsense. The impish character, Puck, in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, looking at the way human characters around him are behaving, declares, “What fools these mortals be”. Amen
Meditation, pure and simple, is to see things the way they are. I neither accept nor reject what I judge to be my folly. I just see it for what it is. That’s as close as I can get to “enlightenment”. Enlightenment is seeing how ignorant and limited I am, but only when I can see with eyes of kindness and compassion and tolerance. Enlightenment is difficult only in the sense that I’ve been taught to deny my own dark side and to live out of a false sense of who I am. I’m afraid of my imperfections. I’ve learned to neutralize the intensity of these fears and see my demons as my own creations.
Being negative, it seems to me, is as natural as breathing. I listen to myself and to people around me, to the talk shows and the newspapers. We seem to be always looking for the worst in people. I think this is merely a reflection of how we feel about ourselves. It’s like tapping into our own pool of negativity and spreading it like a virus. I seem to be always judging, weighing, evaluating, comparing myself to someone else, and feeling superior or inferior. We can easily understand the world. It is made up of people just like ourselves; limited, imperfect. We can likewise see ourselves reflected in the world. “What fools these mortals be”.
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