conflict

how to dissolve a dragon

243

If a plant that thrives in temperate zones is placed under the tropical sun it doesn’t take long to die.  If a creature that thrives in temperate zones is brought to the steaming tropics it will try to run away.  Yet if a human that thrives in temperate zones finds itself in those tropical climes it will often force itself to adapt with a barrage of shoulds, oughts, musts, and air-conditioning.

Conflict may seem to be resolved in the mind but the body silently suffers.  The evidence is visible all around: lethargy alcoholism substance-abuse obesity skin-cancer depression … and the root of all this suffering?  The dragon – the one described so well by Joseph Campbell as the dragon whose every scale bears the dictum: THOU SHALT!

The secret sword that slays the dragon is the question: WHO SHALT?

Who is the one who must adapt? And who says so? Dragons are notoriously difficult to find, yet they dissolve in the mirror-light of Awareness.  The conditioning that constructs them vaporizes.  No ‘shalts’ survive.  It’s all a matter of fearless eye-balling.

~

life’s got a thing going with my zafu

234

“How do you find the time to sit?” I’m asked.
Well, I don’t.  I will explain.

Decades passed with ml desiring more time to sit.
The cushion was ever calling, but she was a self with things-to-be-done.
They lined up in lists and no matter how many were struck off, accomplished, more recruits would appear to replace them.
She longed for more time in which to achieve all the must-do’s that self spun around its existence.
She longed too, for the space and silence of the zafu.
And all that longing created conflict.

So, what changed all that?
When the impossibility of ml’s existence as a separate solid entity was seen, everything shifted.

ml was replaced by Life, Itself, and Life loves using the zafu as its launch-pad for the return to Itself – point ZERO.

So I confess I don’t have to find time; nor is it really true to say, “I sit.”

But it happens.
~