Eating a Sandwich

Learning in groups and collaborating with others is a real experience in letting go. Why do I say that? It is because the process of learning and collaborating introduces all kinds of dangers, one of which is the fear that all one’s best laid plans will not ripen. The more spontaneous I am with others, the more I see impermanence in everything that happens. At any given moment, a person can say or do something that takes the conversation in a different direction. So in this sense, one has to learn to let go in collaboration with all experiences. This is one way of looking at things, but in another way, I ask myself: why is there this separation of myself and other people in the first place? Isn’t that sense of separation the more basic mistake I make, rather than trying to figure out how to hold my own in a group?

From the perspective of what I learned in the last couple of weeks, this letting go does not require some effort to get rid of thoughts. It rather means not thinking that I am one thing or another. Anything I experience is all going to be mine. So why is it that when I hear a voice, I think that voice belongs to someone else? This is a habitual reaction that arises, the tendency to separate my understanding from someone else’s.

As I was eating lunch today, the thought came to mind of , ‘does the mind really eat a sandwich?’ And I can’t honestly say that mind does anything or interfaces with anything. It is like an operating system in the sense that whatever programs I place into it or run, mind remains basically the same. But most of the time, I am not even thinking of mind. I am getting lost in the objects of experience, such as the body, the self, the thought of who I am, etc. These phenomena seem so pervasive that they are like clouds covering an always clear sky. Meditative practice is one way to get back to the fundamental nature of the awareness, knowing that awareness does not interact with anything at all. To claim as such would be like saying that the water ‘interacts’ with waves, when in reality they are expressions of the same, where one is only the form of the other.

But who eats, anyway? Is it this mind? This body? Which one is me?

It is hard for me to sink into this teaching, which arises from Buddhism. None of this is my own idea, but it is something I feel compelled to revisit again and again.