Gorgeous

Good morning. Today is Monday, a new day. This is the first day of the rest of your week. I smell eggs and toast, right here at Hollywood High. Perhaps it's not toast at all. Perhaps its gas. The fizzle of sizzle that ruminates from the beginning of the hampster wheel. I slept quite poorly last night, thank you very much. Co-dependent withdrawal is not an easy thing. To take away the focus from another person, and put it where it belongs is deeply disturbing. I'm not sure that most people would willingly go through this kind of change. Unless they absolutely have to. I often wonder what it is that keeps putting me in the hospital. Is it the flu? The food poisoning? Or maybe it is the subconcious not dealing very well with what it means to stop the incessant caretaking and codependency. The ego is a funny animal. It really doesn't deal very well at all with here and now. I just want more and more and more, and THEN I will be happy, at peace, content, secure. It is so hopelessly identified with itself that any possible revelation of it's strange and illusory nature causes it to reassert it's power. The mind is its do-bidder. The mind runs the ship, but takes its order from "Mr. Shadow". Then, we little people down here, the "meek", kind of wait around and have to listen to this rot gut. The hideous cruelty of the voices that tell us "no" and "you can't". But more than all of these, the voice (or voices, depending on your medication) pound into you your unworthiness. You are essentially unworthy, says the voice. And you need to do many many more things to make yourself worthy. But the nasty part of it is that when you do these things that the ego tells you to do, most of which are about your outsides, then you STILL don't feel any more worthy. The whole race is a big giant slalom of unworthiness chasing its own tail.

If you are unconcious of this then you are its absolute and total prisoner. But you will be unconcious of this fact, and hence will not know that you are under arrest. You won't even know that you are in a cage. When you begin the process of waking up you begin to understand the nature of the game, realize that you are not the game at all, but that you are playing the game that you don't know it is a game. You forget that who you are, and what you are, in reality is total bliss and joy and you identify yourself as this body, in this bag of skin, in this time and place but you are never really in this time and place because the ego cannot be here now. When you see through this, when you observe the mind in its habitual state, you begin to achieve sartori, the recognition of the silliness. And, as the Zen monk says, you laugh yourself silly.

This state, recognition, requires a fundamental commitment to presence on a daily basis. It is a choice. Instead of turning on the news in the morning ( a habit I have done away with completely) you begin the day with connection to your true nature as the ever-present one mind. You begin a concious contact of turning it over to what come to believe is the true nature of self. You let go and surrender. From this place comes the gift of acceptance and, ultimately, inner peace. The peace of God.

What could be more valuable?