What is your pattern?
To avoid engaging with life.
What is life?
Life is the propagation of seeds, and ideas, and plants, and snails, and trash, and sediment.
It’s the outward flowing of energy to make more energy, humans, flowers, light waves, ocean waves, sea anemones.
Energy to make thoughts.
Wait. . . Thoughts?
Is life a pattern of blossoming thoughts?
What are thoughts? Is it possible that thoughts are the cause of trouble for a man?
The case could be made.
What is a thought? It’s a collection, a bundle of language associations.
A thought is a tiny story. The mind made story is a thought.
When a thought feels negative or bad or yucky, whatever, it’s just evidence of a dream gone wrong.
Of a man with a nightmare to wake from.
The bad dream is simply to notice the bundle of words in the mind as bad.
The disturbing thought pattern held as attention.
As a temporary reality story.
And to wake is to recognize it as a vapor.
But here’s the kicker. Awake is also to recognize the happy thought pattern as a good dream.
Both are just dreams.
Both recipes of words that produce energies called feelings. . .
which solidify or vapor-collect into larger groupings we call emotions.
Where is the character in these scenarios? The character is the gateway.
The adopter of bliss or blah or black.
The character plays out joy, boredom, or outrage.
And who are you? The one who watches and animates the character.
You exist, the character doesn’t.
It dies or fizzles without an animating story.
We are all coming to the same realizations.
From a billion different directions.
We are clean, unfettered and one in a mirror world . . .
but only without our animating stories.
The Karen-like character in the Starbucks who assaults me with a toy phone has an animated story.
He sends a tattletale recording to Nextdoor.com, perhaps.
He could care less about people with dogs coming through.
In simple terms, his character cares deeply, emotionally about protecting its story.
Its version of the rules.
Its narrative about what’s important in the world.
And my character digs in against that character because my character loves freedom
and disregarding a rule or two.
These two characters must clash with each other.
These characters must “launch a war” in the Bhagavad Gita sense.
They entertain Brahman by energizing against each other.
They push against each other so the rest of us
– the audience, the observers, the whole container of the one story (the universe) –
can witness itself as some sort of self-important reality.
Absurdly, sadly, interestingly, none of it is real.
All is mirror.
All is dialogue.
All is playing with words like playing with symbols or letters in a game of Wordle.
All for amusement.
And it’s Wednesday.
And the trash is picked up again, just like any other Wednesday.
The detritus of the bins and the mind is cleared as the characters settle back into the thought. . .
. . . that they don’t exist.