Dear Tommy:

“I am no teacher and what little I know… You probably know more than I do” – I love your humility. I can’t bring myself to match it, but I like it. Coming to think about it, I already expressed myself with some humility in these forums following your lead, with your humility on my mind. But I don’t want to overdo it, don’t want to present myself as less-than, as inferior. Yet humility is a very good thing, essential, really, to know one’s limitations.

“When one thinks, the person is caught up in this mind, in this ego. And so, we have this constant monologue” – on my walk in the last couple of days, walking among the trees and sounds of birds and frogs and little waterfalls, I tried to understand Ego, and it occurred to me that ego=thinking. As simple as that, and it fits with your sentence, boldfaced above.

As I walked, I tried to not think and remembered how it always felt like I was failing at it and I felt badly about myself for failing at yet another task. I then thought that it must be impossible for any person to not think for long, like for a whole hour, when one has access to a language with hundreds of thousands of words all in between one’s two ears. I thought to myself: it’s okay if I don’t think for just a little while, every once in a while, so I focused on the sounds, the sights and the feel of the cold air against my face and I felt calm. I realized that my goal is not to not-think for the whole duration of the walk, or for five minutes… I am not a competition with anyone who I imagine can do better. I am taking a break, that’s all. Here is my guideline for myself:  when stressed- take a break.

“More practice and the peacefulness grows. Practice allows the moments between thoughts become longer. The depth of the stillness” – better than taking a break when stressed is taking breaks all along and in so doing, preventing or slowing down the buildup of stress.

“Maybe you have heard of Koans. A famous one is ‘What is the sound of one hand clap?‘” – koan: “a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason…” (Merriam Webster). Elsewhere, about Hakuin Ekaku, the Japanese Zen master who might have been the one that came up with the-sound-of-one-hand-clap koan: “He once said that, not knowing how near the truth is,  most people will often seek it far away… We should never seek the answers by taking it further away in…with our minds. We should silence our mind, and feel the truth as it arises silently… silencing the noise of our minds”.

I just clapped with one hand and the sound was a swishing sound.

“the five skandhas… My mind shuts down when it comes to complicated thoughts about self. I just think of ego as what I believe myself to be” – I looked up skandhas on Wikipedia and read your explanation and it is too complicated for me. I like simplicity, like ego=thinking. This can stick in my brain so that when I see the word ego, I will substitute it with thinking.

“Sorry, I cannot really give you a good answer” – I think and feel that you led me to good answers over the last three days, on my walks and here, while typing away this long post, thank you!

anita