Demolitions

On the way through Sheppard Subway station, I saw a demolition team going into the mall interstices to drill through some walls. And later this morning on the way to the back specialist, I saw two cars had collided with each other close to Bloor Street. What do these events signify in my mind?
  Demolitions are easier than constructions--and somehow more fascinating. I think there is something about the human mind that likes to stop to see destruction such as car accidents, and for the life of me, I can't quite figure out the reason why. Could it be that there is a certain part of us that instinctively wants to let go of the pressure to keep constructing? Is the opposite element also necessary for the maintenance of life?
     I have been reading a book by Chongyam Trungpa called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, where he talks about this tendency for humans to build the ego, either through the Lord of Form (material possessions), the Lord of Speech (identification with words, concepts, language) and the Lord of Mind (spiritual ideas). The latter is most difficult to detect because a lot of spiritual practitioners decide to emulate their spiritual teachers rather than doing the difficult "demolition" of letting go and simply being with whatever energies are emerging in mind. Chongyam Trungpa remarks:
 
The exciting, colorful, dramatic quality of the emotions captures our attention as if we were watching an absorbing film show. In the practice of meditation we neither encourage emotions nor repress them. By seeing them clearly, by allowing them to be as they are, we no longer permit them to serve as a means of entertaining and distracting us. Thus they become the inexhaustible energy which fulfills egoless action (p.10-11)

This teaching is difficult because it requires that a person completely release any ideas they have about themselves as being good or bad, spiritual or non-spiritual, and not to accumulate any ideas nor cling to specific ideas as one's identity. I think of this as similar to a human "demolition".
   Until such a time as people can live in this way, they might always be a little bit fascinated by acts of demolition, because such acts hint at a kind of release of grasping and 'constructing' a false or illusory sense of self.

Trungpa, Chogyam. (1973). Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Boulder: Shambhala