Ambition

One of the worries that I often have is that meditation will dampen my drive to write. I suppose if that were true I would have given up writing a long time ago, since I've been meditating in one form or another for at least twenty years.

And yet I maintain this persistent belief that it's interfering with my ability to achieve take off. I suppose that's because I believe that it's interfering with my ambition. But what if it's my ambition that actually interfering with the takeoff? What if it's all the anxiety that comes with my ambition that is really blocking me?

The envy I feel when I see someone younger than I having achieved more. The diminishment I feel when I see someone write more books. Maybe that's the root of my block, not my meditation practice.  Probably it's T.V. that is dampening my drive to write, not meditation.  It's dulling my brain, and then I think what's the point, writing isn't as important as it used to be etc, etc. It's ego that's probably blocking me, not my buddha nature.

Yeah, probably not probably. It's ego.

So for this week I make ambition and the anxiety associated with ambition the object of my meditation. This grasping for greatness.  If I could really see and feel my buddha nature I wouldn't have to grasp. I could just let this greatness sit comfortably in my open palm.

future as addiction

My brain is addicted to the future, whether it's in a state of worry or a state of excitement, I am almost always thinking about life as something that will become worse or better than it is now.

Why can't I get addicted to the present? Because the present is nourishment, not addiction. So why am I not finding nourishment in the present?

I pause to do that and so much stress evaporates instantly. Who cares if Mme Fauteux wins this court case? I'll find an apartment somehow. Odds are I'll negotiate an extension at least until 2013. There's really nothing to panic about, other than mystress over winning or losing, which is really just ego.

It's easy to try and make a project out of liberating myself from my ego, but that's really, paradoxiacally just ego. Just more future when everything will be okay without ego. It's all abstraction without the action of actually being in the present, in this present, with this identity that I have now.

Sometimes the present can feel like an addiction. Sometimes I feel the jouissance, a sort of joyful subversive feeling when I'm not doing anything. It's a radical rebellion to the programming of tending to past and future.