6. No need to stop traffic

This is part of the Mind Training series

6. In daily life,
be a child of illusion.

So what is buddhist practice? Meditation! Wrong!

Meditation is to buddhist practice as a medical laboratory is to Médecins Sans Frontières.

Certainly, sitting down is of eminent importance, but it's all too easy to be a buddha on the cushion and a bastard in the streets. If you are not actually willing to change the way your mind works all the time, sitting in meditation is not much more useful than just telling everyone you're meditating. Anyway, you might as well bullshit others since you're already bullshitting yourself. This way leaves more time to watch kitties riding Roombas on Youtube.

Easier on the old knee caps, too.

But if you're honestly fed up with constantly, unsuccesully, exhaustingly trying to fit the private world of your fears and expectations to the real world you actually share with other people, you may find it useful to occasionally ask yourself, both on-cushion and off-cushion: "So, is this real?"

More often than not I find that, no!, this is not real. I've just made it up, or it's temporary, or it's just the distorted shadow of something else. And the whole world is way, way larger that this, anyway. If this is my self, or it's fascination-of-the-day, which it usually is, I'm bloody arrogant for thinking it's so damn important.

Being a child of illusion means not taking yourself all that seriously all the time. Whether I am wrong of whether I am right, things are the way they are, completely independently from what I happen to think about them.


But I do think, don't I? I do have these emotions and concerns.

Yes, I do. Just because something happens to be an illusion this doesn't mean it isn't there. Seeing that you are attached to someone is good. Seeing that this attachement is illusory is very good. But concluding from that that you're not really attached is very, véry dumb. And again, it's arrogant, in this case because I'm according more value to one thought over an other, just because I happen to identify with it more.

The mind training here is to simply keep in touch with reality; it's not about philosophizing your feelings away. If you happen to be angry, by all means, be angry. It's just that when all you can see is the anger you're really making a fool of yourself. Reality is so much larger!

Being a child of illusion is seeing that the real world is big enough to tolerate a little anger. There's no need to stop traffic just because I'm feeling something.

Maybe it's not that the show must go on but it does, yeah? Why not get out there, relax and enjoy it?

image: Mexico city traffic, CC by stevec77