I hate you, me.

I read in a blog..."How our minds figure out so many ways to impede our life from bursting forth completely."

There is too much time wasted on this personification ( this anthropomorphization) of a devilish "ego" lurking like a Mr. Hyde in the soul/brain. That's not to say there are not urges, habits, patterns of thought that get in our way. But it is to say all of it is me. And, perhaps more importantly, it is all there because of conditions. It is dependent origination that gives rise to my current self expression, not some trickster "ego" figuring out ways to impede my life bursting forth.

There is no enemy here. Nothing of 'me' that should be rejected. Besides this ego concept hindering me, the greater risk in this is that making a habit of seeing a n'er do well "ego" in me runs the risk of seeing others that way too. Casting them as poor parents of 'self', if they would just put that pesky ego in time out and give it some discipline, it would go away.

I do not yet know how to get to the other shore, from which no "other shore" can be seen. I think there is a needed process in growth where the mind must mess with concept so it can see the mind....where the fish sees it is in a fish bowl. Having that not just understood, but, I'm supposing, incorporated into world view, or perhaps like a snake skin, the whole lot is sluffed off, and it all becomes a bunch of now, greeted in comfort like an old friend.

Layman Pang wrote

"There is no I and there is no other.
How can there be intimacy or estrangement?
I recommend giving up trying to get there by meditation,
But rather, directly seizing the reality at hand.
The message of the Diamond Sutra is:
Nothing is excluded from our experienced world.
From beginning to end,
It inevitably exposes our false identities."

There is "this one" and "that one", but no difference between the two. I and another are both fountains. springs, each bubbling forth a different stream of dependent origination, but fundamentally both springs, both exactly equal. The sky here is exactly the same as the sky there, but the snowflakes from each differ.

There is no closeness or afar-ness between people. Just commonality.

He does not recommend giving up meditation, but rather trying to get there by meditation. There is nowhere else to which to get. Seize "now".

Nothing is excluded. Not even me now, with that I call "faulty" in myself. Even all this "me" is part of the dharma.

Do not make decisions to resolutely live a new way. Accept I am what I am supposed to be. Guide my ox with care in new directions until "I" and ox fade gently away and the hand of thought relaxes.


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