The Nature Of Mind

The nature of mind is empty.

Of course you think it’s not

because of all the little voices

in it telling you it’s full and

that you need those thoughts 

to survive, manage, get ‘er done.

There’s no instruction manual

that lays out how to live, hence

the accumulation of thoughts,

and the logic into which they fit,

is the jury-rigging with which we

Tarzan our way through life clinging 

from vine to vine in the larger 

overwhelming jungle we’d rather

ignore as much as survival will allow.

(Aside: I saw this great bumper sticker:

“I brake when the little voices in my head tell me to.”)

When our mind stops, when we see

the beauty of a flower, when we get

the punchline of a joke, the gap at a

conclusion of conversation, when we

get hit in the head by a brick are brief

moments of enlightenment, say the 

masters.    

Most minds are completely untrained.

I don’t mean training as in doing things.

I mean the mind itself as an organ, muscle 

if you like, organic computing machina.

Education hardly gets past finger painting.

The Eastern traditions examined the mind.

They found out what it is.

That still happens to people in the world,

but the window is closing.

Not to be pedantic, but, Jesu Christo,

do you want to find yourself old, and

think: “I wasted my life.”?

(“Lying in a hammock at William Duffy’s

farm, Pine Island, Minnesota” James Wright)