Bubbles

Pleasure is to contentment as bubbles are to water, as froth to the sea.

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Hello, goodbye

Ego is the energy of attachment, of clinging-ness, to name, gene pool, job title, wealth, physical appearance, education, family. These are not wrong, just temporary. So ego is also the energy of fear.

The first fact

Everything is temporary. The galaxies are temporary. One day our sun will blink out. As for us, said the freed slave with the twisted leg, we are souls carrying corpses. To illustrate the point, the Buddha upheld a picked flower. Seeing its severed stem, its petals, one of his followers stopped asking questions.

Man as actor

The ego is who I think I am. It is a limited, temporary and entirely mind-based sense of self. So men say: “I am a millwright.” Or, “I am a stay-at-home dad.” But we are not the roles we play. Marlon Brando did not tell people he was a mafia don. On examination, we find that the question “Who am I?” can only be answered in the negative, e.g., not this, not that. We concede one all-purpose exception to a blinking list of negative statements: “I am an actor.”

Fatherhood

Fatherhood can begin and end in an instant, but in that instant one man calls another man “father”.

A good father is a godfather. It’s a temporary assignment. There is no biological connection, nor any need for one.

Un-fathered men are loose cannons.