Duck hunting at the jungle pond

“There’s a monkey in my mind, swinging on a vine trapeze, reaching back to the past or leaning into the future, never standing still. Sometimes, I want to kill that monkey, shoot it square between the eyes so I won’t have to think anymore or feel the pain of worry, but today, I thank her, and she jumped down, straight into my lap, trapeze still swinging as we sat still.” – Kaveri Patel, cited by Tara Brach in a Mindfulness Daily meditation. In the same session, she observed: it’s possible to respond to our obsessive thinking with patience, forgiveness, and even humor. Thoughts are like birds, flying through the sky. We don’t need to knock them out with duck-hunting rifles.

If you don’t fancy meditation and the sensation of integrated consciousness that it invokes, then perhaps this is a simpler way to put it: There’s no such thing as a separate individual. You don’t make your own oxygen. Everything in nature, including you and me, is dependent on everything else. You extirpate the wolves and the forest goes fallow; kill the plants and we all die. Seek the balance love brings by Way of the Way and all the children will remember your name after you’ve returned to your source.

This place, where you are right now reading this in the virtual aethersphere, this thought connected to yours, this is where you can upgrade your software. Because right now, at this very moment, you can be your highest self by simply letting go — of the anger, the outrage, the craving, the fear, the ego, the label you have for yourself. Let go of the feeling that there is a self, crouching like a tiger behind your eyes. You are, we are, I am, the universe — animated energy connecting. And the universe is experiencing itself through us. – with thanks to Jeff Krasno.