Everything is in Process

The subway seems slow as I head home from downtown. I find the wheels lurching along the tracks between Davisville and Eglinton Station, and I start to wonder if I can get home before 10. Time presses onward. But is there such a thing? It is just a thought.

There are times when I don’t think I have enough time to do everything I wanted to do. And then I think: what are my priorities? What do I most want to learn and do? Is it so easy to know? If my mind is focused on one thing, of course it is pretty easy: just focus on achieving that one goal, to the detriment of all else. But impermanence abounds. If I stay with one thing, it soon starts to become a question mark. What is the importance of this one thing I want? What does it mean to focus on only that thing, and not the other factors that make up a life? If I pursue a degree and let go of all my social connections, I will be left with a degree on the wall and no friends. Does that work? The goal starts to lose its value when I see everything that supports the goal itself, including all the people one needs to stay alive and thriving.

If I measure my life according to one standard, then even eating and sleeping become like agony. Why? It’s because eating and sleeping are serving nothing but the body. They don’t have any intrinsic nature or special ideal. What happens when those necessities arise and one is caught up chasing after his or her one thing? Maybe I stop eating, or just stop taking care of myself. I remember reading a story about a man who starved himself because he was stuck playing a highly addictive sort of video game. Even though perhaps his reasoning might have convinced him that it is just a game, his emotion still stuck to the thought of the game itself. And I have heard similar things happen to mice when they were exposed to a button that excited pleasure signals in their brain. The animals would stop eating and would prefer stimulating their brains in this way rather than sustaining their bodies. This is the power of desire.

The “one thing” is slippery because it is not one thing at all. It is a series of thoughts, all of which don’t relate to or interact with the previous thought. Why chase after one thing? It is a delusion, but it reflects the desire to take all these thoughts and make coherent shapes out of them. We do it with the constellations. Depending on which country one comes from, they might see different shapes from looking at the stars. Again, I am reminded of this analogy: the incense stick creates a circle when it is twirled around. We see the circle, but is the circle real? It is just previous thought and present thought joined in a new thought. But the thoughts have already passed. They were never joined to begin with.

I try to remind myself, whatever I have now is resulting from shifting conditions. Everything is part of a process that never ends. But I should not take anything I do as having an antecedent cause that I can influence. Thoughts are emerging like bubbles. I think I had this thought before, but it’s a completely new thought.