Having lost one of my dear animal companions recently----and almost losing both dogs----set my world on edge for a while. Add to that my increasingly regular practice of meditation while reading as much as I can about Buddhism, and one can deduce a little how I feel these days----rather as if my skin has been peeled back and a constant wind is blowing. I exaggerate. . . a little.
What continues to bubble up are many truisms I used to take for granted as being, well, true, sayings like "Better safe than sorry," that seem now designed to imprison a person by fear, though not in any concerted way, just as a typical human tendency to seek safety, and through this continual seeking after the safe, finding that our hearts are closing more and more and that we begin to hide in the comfort of our homes, and that we begin to forget how to love. Sound like the typical American?
Another statement, that "Pain is not a punishment and pleasure is not a reward," continues to roll around in my mind but the meaning is as slippery as ever. On the one hand, it seems obvious and perfectly contradictory to how we are conditioned to believe life works. Even though many of us have argued vehemently against the idea that "pain is a punishment" (i.e., that homeless person deserves his fate because he did something bad), it's not quite as easy to argue that "pleasure is not a reward." We tend to want to believe that one.
But the most beneficial basic belief I am attempting each day to internalize is a belief in my (and all beings') basic goodness. My Southern Baptist upbringing almost beat that out of me, though some part of me always denied those precepts about exclusivity---that we are somehow "born into sin" and must make a conscious choice---One Choice---in order to be "saved."
And these are the sorts of thoughts that rush in after I've sat and meditated and labeled what pops up at that time as merely thoughts, those ephemeral visions we tend to stitch our worlds from rather than experience the real, live, world of this very moment, the one that Mauser, the cat in the photo above, does. . .
