*image by Ben Harubin

 

Homeowner's Tip:
If you want to rearrange your furniture, there are two ways
to approach it -- one is poetic, theoretical, metaphorical even;
and the other is to just move the stuff around and
be done with it.

A father told his son a story:
"There was once a man who decided all that was needed to accomplish that special
task of changing his state of awareness was to constantly look at his feet. And
sure enough, when he'd do so, his awareness would immediately shift into the state
he sought."

"But a problem quickly became apparent. Almost as soon as he'd remember to
constantly look at his feet, and the shift in awareness took place, he'd start to think
about the whole affair, how successful and simple it was, how often he forgot about it,
how delighted he was to have discovered it and so forth, and in doing so would cease
looking at his feet and lose the new state."

With that the father appeared to have ended the tale. And after a bit of silence between them,
the lad said, "You do know that you've already told me basically that same story several
hundred times already in various garb?"

"So why's this one any different? What's new with it?
And why do you keep repeating it to me?"

And the old man responded by taking a bus schedule from his pocket, which he began to
thumb through while muttering just loud enough to be heard, "You know, I've never gotten
around to actually going anywhere. Hmmm...let's see now...."

A certain man recently seemed unable to not pose this question to himself.
"Is there any chance that the so-called 'state of sleep' from which mystics
believe they suffer and against which they struggle is caused not by a faulty
use of the mind, as they maintain, but rather by a faulty understanding of
the mind's purpose?"

After proposing this possibility, he fell silent for a bit as he considered
it, then said, "Boy, if so, wouldn't the joke be on them?"

Poem:
Oh --
you can't fall down without the mind,
and you can't get up without the mind,
(you know, under these circumstances,
thinking of your "getting back up" as progress
doesn't somehow smell per-zactly kosher and
FDA approved).

One man had what he considered to be a bad habit, which he couldn't seem to
give up, but he would feel momentarily "better" each time he'd remember his
desire to do so.

There was once a man who lived far up in the mountains who supposedly
"knew the secret," and when anyone would come to him, asking how they
too could learn same, he would tell them, "Go off and sit silently among the
trees and do nothing but 'think about thinking,' and after twenty or thirty years,
if it all doesn't become perfectly clear, then I will invite you to be my guest
and push me off a cliff...and talk bad about my mama."