Deafening

I sat on my balcony a little while ago and meditated. I noticed the cacaphony of sounds that permeated the street I live on. A non-stop symphony of life, of living. The sounds of being alive. I noticed, however, my ego mind judging each and every sound that arose and fell. The endless variations of condemnation poured out of my head in a full scale attack on the din. I also watched how I began to let go of myself and watch how my ego functions and how I automatically wanted to fix my ego and tell it to stop condemning these noises. To let me alone and allow me to accept the sounds. I watched, from a perch of detachment and rode this debate into a place of great peacefulness. I realized, felt, that the noise I hear around me all day and all night is really the noise plus my mind. My mind makes the noise that much louder by it's automatic judgement of the noise coupled with my attempting to fight my automatic mental process. These whole way of fighting turns the nob to eleven. When I get real quiet, go within, the sound becomes spacious, equanimous, and passes by like clouds, ephemera. I then suffer no more. Of course until I come out of the meditation and the non-stop idiocy starts all over again. What are we to do? We can't meditate every minute of the day. But being in the present moment is the closest we have to living an active meditation. The Vipassana Buddhist practice calls it "mindfullness". A kind of living meditation when you are simply doing the thing that you are doing completely, undistracted. I fight against this because my mind wants to wander all the friggin time, the little horse it is. Watch what happens in the first ten minutes of meditation, see how every impulse is to do something. See how many times your nose itches. And see what happens when you let it itch. Soon, very soon, your ego surrenders and you come home.
But to do this in ambulatory life, well that's the challenge.