Saturday evening

"Because of forgetfulness and prejudices, we generally cloak reality with a veil of false views and opinions. This is seeing reality through imagination. Imagination is an illusion of reality which conceives of reality as an assembly of small pieces of separate entities and selves."

– Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness

So, first of all, never mind that hologram analogy from a couple of weeks ago. It's not that we're just semi-real. We're real; we're just not what we appear to be to the unenlightened eye.

Second of all, I was taken by the use in this paragraph of the words 'forgetfulness' and 'prejudices.'

I've been working on mindfulness - which I understand to mean being aware of what's happening in the present moment and seeing it for what it actually is - for awhile, and one of the biggest obstacles I've encountered is simply remembering to do it.

If you're like me, you often find yourself mentally 'lost in space' while driving. Ever had the experience of finding yourself at your destination, sitting at the wheel of your car, but having absolutely no memory of having driven there? When I was a news anchor, I used to have what I called 'out of body newscasts' where I couldn't even remember what stories I'd read in the previous half hour.

During those times, my mind was 'somewhere else.' Most of the time, in my particular case, I was revisiting some past trauma or unpleasant experience. Not only could I not remember how I'd gotten to my destination, I arrived in a seething rage over something that had happened to me in 1978.

But I've actually had some success in training myself so that when my mind wanders onto certain subjects, it snaps back into the present moment and I can stop and think, 'Okay, where am I right now? What is happening around me right now?'

Thirty-plus years ago, when I was a devout fundamentalist Christian and attending all kinds of 'training sessions' and 'seminars' and 'institutes,' one of the concepts that they tried to drive home with us all the time was 'thought control.' I bristled at the notion; it sounded too much like 'The Manchurian Candidate,' or maybe 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.'

But the Buddha also advocated a certain kind of 'thought control.' I don't have the quotes here in front of me, but if you've had any exposure to meditation instruction at all, you've probably heard the phrase 'monkey mind'... the part of your mind that wants to run off and climb trees and grab at bananas when you're trying to sit quietly. The reason they teach beginning meditators to count their breaths is so the 'monkey mind' will have something to keep it occupied while the students are trying to break through that first level of meditation.

Teaching oneself to remain mindful is also a form of thought control. It's a patterning of thinking habits. There's still a part of me that's a little offput by that notion, but after fifty-odd years of thrashing about and, as they say, repeating the same actions while expecting different results, I'm willing to try a little thought control. (But no, I'm not going back to Navigators sessions, thank you very much.)

Now, onto the word 'prejudices.' Because of prejudices, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, we cloak reality with a veil of false views and opinions. In our cultural context, we tend to use 'prejudice' as a shorthand for 'racial prejudice' or 'ethnic prejudice,' but of course there are other kinds.

'Why is that person staring at me?' Well, is that person really staring at you, or did you just make eye contact for a second and something about his or her clothes, body language or even race struck you as a little odd or a little threatening? Think that one all the way through: maybe you based the incorrect assumption he was staring at you on the incorrect assumption he was weird or dangerous based on an incorrect assumption about why he was dressed the way he was.

If you see things as they actually are, what you'd see in this case might be that a guy in a biker jacket made eye contact with you for a second. All the rest is your imagination and assumptions.

And then, of course, there's the 'illusion of reality' versus the Buddhist view of reality which sees all things as part of a single whole, rather than as separate entities.

"This is you and this is me and this is the Eiffel Tower... it's Paris!"

Bernard Jaffe, Existential Detective,
in I Heart Huckabee's

The ability to see reality in a non-dualisitic way is the main goal of meditation practice. What I'm saying, though, is that through mindfulness, we can rid ourselves of a lot of misunderstandings, misapprehensions and inaccurate assumptions that inhibit our ability to live.

(this posted was edited Sunday morning)