When we are clear in our speaking and thinking we feel better. How can we exercise our mind to think,speak and be more clear? Practice! If we just sit. And while sitting understand that we really are... just star dust from a distant explosion in a place and time far, far away but still real. Our best science tells us exactly that. We are the remnants of that Big Bang at the beginning of time and the physical beginning of the universe. Yes just well organized star dust that now is so organized it carries feelings and thought in carbon and nitrogen and oxygen that make up our bodies and ultimately our minds.
When we become the moment. When we realize and personify impermanence, non-self and inter-being. When we practice long enough as we sit quietly. We awaken. The goal of sitting is to cultivate a mind that is both one pointed and yet maintains evenness. But too many people think that sitting on a cushion is what meditation is about, when in reality the sitting part is just training wheels for getting up and walking and then striding through life awake and engaged, protectors of life, practicing generosity, behaving responsibly and consuming mindfully in our awareness that life is impermanence, that we are not just ourselves and that ourselves are not just us but that we are inextricably and irrevocably intertwined with others, all the other on the planet, and the plants and animals and the sky and sea and the minerals that make up the earth itself. We are them and they are us, not figuratively but literally.
Sit quietly and let all that sink in. We are both just one, separate and profoundly alone and yet we are One with all that is, at the same time. When I breath in oxygen to fuel my body and thinking were did it come from? Plants. And when I exhale CO2 where does it go... into plants to build their very core of being. When I walk and talk were does the energy come from? From the sun, the most amazing energy collection system on the planet harvesting the sun and creating the food that we eat either directly for the vegetarians among us or indirectly for those that eat the animals that eat the plants first.
When we sit with a quiet mind and an open heart you don't even need a book to read you can simply think deeply about your own breathing or your own hunger and really understand either of them to see how we are interconnected and not all that separate from either other people, the plants on the planet or even the earth that supplies the rest of the material we are literally made of.
"The wind comes up
and the bamboo welcomes it.
The wind goes
and it lets it go."
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