The spirit and the brain.  Sounds like a title of a movie where a medium is taken hostage by an alien.  Well, that’s not too far from the truth of how as spiritual beings we have to deal with our minds.  Training the mind is the task it seems to me.

The mind is a lovely organ made of clay.  It is instinctively a comparison organ, perhaps like our sense of taste.  Is this good?  Do I like this?  Am I going to continue with this?  Yes or no?  And we learn from collective experience–theoretically.  Many died taste-testing, mixing explosives, fighting for peace, running across a buffalo rampage, interrupting domestic violence.  Lots of cultural rules were established on what didn’t work.

Many ideas do work.  One of them is training the brain to sit still and not talk.  Or rather, to sit and watch itself ramble without taking itself at all seriously.  I spent the other day watching trees sway in light wind.  I traced ridges from soft waves designed at the bottom of the lake.  I sat and listened to sleepy afternoon birds and the scurry of small forest creatures.

I intend this day to be as deeply and metaphysically instructing–I watch in the stillness and breathe in the wisdom of no action.