“How to live satisfied”

We do not often pay attention to the workings of our mind, and the effect of “time” on it.

In fact, it seems, all living creatures can only experience “this moment”.

But our mind reaches out into the past, to create context, and into the future to deduce what will happen next.

If a person sits quietly, and brings the minds focus onto NOW and HERE, something strange begins to happen.

The mind waves begin to quiet down, and our sense of a Center begins to come into focus.

If we never practice a quiet time, where thoughts are allowed to slip into the background, our Centre becomes more and more a distant place.

In a sense, our sleeping CAN do the same thing for us, and an unwinding, slowing down, and focusing can happen, but it is essentially unconscious…..

The less we spend time being aware of our Centre, the more our self defence mechanisms can build defences against everything around us.

An interesting note about what most folks sense when they are connected to their Centre. It seems to tell them that they do not need to be afraid of the things outside themselves, and that their moment to moment walk can simply be one of one step, one step, one step.

In fact, the disconnected mind sees this as dangerous and tells us that we are being lulled into a hypnotic sleep which we may or may not awake from….

So there IS a conflict happening that we experience as a cognitive dissonance.

There IS a Centre that is clean and subjective, and there is our “normal waking” mind that is all about dangers and survival.

No wonder we are conflicted.

If we wander too far out into the normal waking mind, we become scared, paranoid, and dangerous due to our protection instincts.

IF we wander too far INWARD, we lose our proper survival instincts.

All the philosophies and psychologies try to work their way thru this, but cannot come up with answers.

The reason for this is that we use MIND to distinguish THIS and THAT, but the answer lies in the fact that both this and that are empty.

“Things are things because of mind, As Mind is mind because of things,
These two are merely relative and both at source are emptiness.
In emptiness these are not two, yet in each are contained all forms
Once coarse and fine are seen no more then how can there be taking sides?

One of the secrets that is found in Zen practice, is that there is a Unity above the This and That.