The noose is on. Don’t kick the chair out!
Last night I had an audience with Lhoppon-la at http://miphamshedra.org/. We talked about a few things and eventually talked a bit about my frustratingly active mind. When I sit I’ve got two problems:
A) I’m uncomfortable as all get out.
B) My brain goes on turbo power soving all the problems of the day. As I’m a programmer this is particularly troublesome - I spend all day trying to get problems into my head and then and hour of meditation trying to get them out.
Lhoppon took out part of his robe, twisted it into a rope, then into a noose, then hung himself with it. Laughing, he said that my thoughts were like the rope but that my thoughts were not the problem. I must of have looked confused because because he continued, “It’s not the thoughts but the consistency of them that’s the issue - they are binding your mind to the external world and preventing you from seeing anything inside. What you need to do is simply to notice when you are strongly tied to an external problem and this will lessen it a little bit. Take this rope, it’s composed of tiny strands of string, if we slowly pull them out, one by one, you’ll be left with nothing but a pile of string and you cannot hang yourself with a pile of string.”
