Awareness

What we call ‘ego’ is a mind addicted to thinking. Does it need to be said that thinking about this addiction can only feed the addiction? A higher faculty than thought is required.

A space for everything

Yes, be a space for emotions, rejecting only those that have been deliberately induced. The essential thing is not to identify with them—in effect, to become an emotion. The sky is not a cloud and we are not emotions. They come. They go.

Flat on my back

Let’s view our thoughts from a distance, with the non-reactive interest of a nephrologist surveying a cloudscape. What he sees is, well, what he sees. Here comes a cumulonimbus. There goes a cumulonimbus.

Human reactors

More suffering is created by emotional reactivity than by emotions themselves. Emotions are fine, neither bad nor good, just passing through. Sometimes we identify with our emotions to the extent that we become them. While emotional reactivity can be understood, it cannot be justified.

Cloud watchers

Everything is continually appearing and disappearing. Vanishment happens not just to individuals but to whole civilizations. Nephophiles are perhaps more attuned to the glory of this undulating impermanency than the rest of us.