May 22, 2003

they just appear

Growing up in an Judeo-Christian culture, I’ve got original sin ingrained into my psyche. Probably like many western converts to Buddhism, I take karma to mean, “bad things I’ve done in the past.” Of course this isn’t true because plenty of good things are happening in my life at any given moment. This is also a creation of karma and should be emphasized just as much as all of the negative stuff happening in my life. But it usually isn’t.

While listening to class five of the Heart Sutra yesterday, Geshe-la said something interesting that has been bouncing around my head. He asked, “are you a speaker or a listener?” In other words, does that conversation in your head — you know, the one you can’t seem to get rid of — have one dialogue or two? I think mostly we listen. All day long I listen to this person (presumably it’s me about 5 milliseconds prior) telling me what to do, what to say, when to do it and when to say it. What’s really interesting is I don’t seem to have any control over it! Thoughts just arise without having to do anything about it.

“I think it’s gonna be okay, Joe.”

“Yeah, what makes you think that?”

“Who knows where thoughts come from, they just appear.” Lucas from Empire Records had it all figured out. Trying to figure out the “who knows” part is really maddening. And maybe that doesn’t matter too much. The fact that most of the thoughts are not pleasant is disturbing. I consider myself to be a pretty positive guy, but mine are almost exclusively negative. I’m told that you can change this voice in your head so that it will only feed you nice, pleasant, beautiful thoughts. I’m told you do this by trying to shut down the negative ones you have now. I’m finding this easier said than done.

posted @ 7:49 AM

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