Woke up this morning, and my son took my phone. Norm on a sat I would get up, kettle on, get online, check bank, check weather, check urban. But instead I lay in the bed, no phone. Got a fair bit going on at the moment, mainly positive stuff tbh, and suddenly my mind took over, and I spent an hour, laying in bed, and my mind was sorting and processing. Things would come up, get resolved, or just petter out, or pre-occupy. Like a rolling, moving mind movement, in Zen terms “Ordinary Mind”, perhaps - on and on, and I occasionally took the role of “observer”, “noticing”, what was going on and to me when you see things like this, away from meditation, actually the opposite of meditation, where it is just the mind doing what It can do given time and space and quiet, the mind operating entirely normally with an assumed “self”, a normal thinking through of one’s life, the no self doctrine paradoxically suddenly can be in full focus. There was me laying in bed with an hour or thinking through all that was going on in my life, thoughts and feelings rolling on and on, a sense of sorting, processing – but no one actually doing it. Happening entirely, without condition, by itself, even when the “I” appeared to claim it, i.e. “oh wow I am thinking through a lot this morning”, or “now I will think through this”. Even the willful, “I-doing”, thoughts arising out of nothing, going back to nothing. “There are good actions and bad actions, but no one doing them” in Buddha himself’s terms. Then I guess there’s a remembering, that this no-self is not just happening when someone is laying in bed/meditation is happening as the norm, whether it is remembered or seen or not. I think, or I like to think anyway, that this is what JC meant when he said “forgive them for they know not what they do”. How can you hate someone fully, to their core, when you can see that there is no one there doing it? I’ve said it on here before, but will say it again – nonduality, Buddhism, can almost, not entirely, but one of the best starting points you can is what Heidegger said: “We don’t come to thought, thought comes to us.” Anyway, I don’t want to appear that I am lecturing, I enjoy writing about this stuff, it is a way of clarifying to myself if anything. I have a Zen connection IRL now and very excited about that – she knows he onions very well and looking forward to chatting with her.
