Lost In the Clouds of Our Minds

Here is a metaphor that will elucidate what we explored in my November’s newsletter – the okayness that is your natural state.  Imagine a beautiful meadow on a sunlit morning.  In this meadow there is a rainbow of wildflowers, along with the heart-opening music of the birds. The smell of heather and the pristine beauty of the surrounding mountains all bring forth a deep sense of peace.

This meadow represents the experience of okayness that is at the heart of life. You knew this okayness when you were very young.  You may have no memories of this kind of peace, but there was a time when there were no thoughts in your head.  You weren’t searching for a better state.  Past and future had no meaning for you, so this moment was all there was.  You were open to it – all of it – and life was okay exactly as it was.  Even if there was pain and discomfort, you fully experienced it.  You didn’t resist it.  Life flowed through you and inside of you was a deep sense of not needing life to be different than what it is.

Now imagine yourself as a young child living in the meadow, fascinated about the newness of every moment, open to everything.  Clouds come and go – as with laughter and tears – but everything flows.  As you grew, thoughts began to fill up your head as you started to tell yourself stories about yourself and about life.  Now imagine the clouds that formerly moved through the meadow sky beginning instead to circle around your head.  At first they are just wispy clouds that don’t fully block your experience of the meadow.  But overtime, usually by adolescence, the clouds completely surround your head, so much so that you can no longer see the meadow.  All you see are the clouds of your mind.

This is where most people live, caught in the cloud bank of their minds, lost in ideas about life rather than the direct experience of it.  As Alan Watts, the well-known Zen philosopher once said, “No matter how many times you say the word water, it will never be wet!”   It may be difficult for you to see that you are lost in a cloud bank because it has been so long since you have experienced the meadow of your being, but know that irritation, resistance, clinging, compulsions, fear, anger, sadness, and loneliness are not a part of your natural self. They are just states of mind to which you have been conditioned, and they can be released as you learn to see what your mind is doing rather than believing you are your thoughts.

The clouds that fill your mind are made up of all of the stories you tell yourself about who and what you are and about life.  You know what I mean – the storyteller in your head that talks all day.  If you had a little door on your forehead that you could open up and watch what the storyteller is saying, you would see it voices an opinion about everything, continuously telling you what it likes and doesn’t like.  It tells you what you should do and shouldn’t do and oftentimes changes from one to the other in a matter of seconds!  It can judge unmercifully, not only other people but also yourself.  And it is afraid – afraid of its own fear and deeply afraid of being alone.

Because the storyteller is constantly trying to “do it right” it manipulates, tries, expects, wants, rages and resists. It generates all sorts of feelings – fear, sadness, self-judgment, anger, doubt, confusion, irritation and despair, to name a few.  The storyteller comes from being disconnect from life.  It comes from believing you are separate from the meadow and thus have to do life rather than be life.  I am not putting down thought.  It is an exquisite tool for maneuvering through our lives, but our thoughts are not reality.  They are not the meadow.  They are just ideas about the meadow.

Now imagine an alien arriving from another planet whose space ship lands beside this meadow.  What he sees is you fighting with your clouds, trying to make them be different or to have them just go away.  As he watches you struggle, he notices that as the clouds become thicker, you have times where you become frozen, lost in despair.  This confuses this alien because he can clearly see that you are struggling with nothing more substantial than clouds.  On top of that, he can see that you have never left the meadow of peace you are so desperately trying to find; you just don’t recognize it!

This is your predicament.  The peace and joy you long for it always right here, right now.  But you have been deeply conditioned into an endless game of struggle – the game that says if you just get yourself and your life to be the way you think they should be, then the peace you long for will be here.  But that will never bring you the lasting peace that is your natural state. You can win the lottery, think happy thoughts until the cows come home, meditate for hours every day in order to find the states of mind you like, do enough plastic surgery to make your body be what you think is perfect, and still, in the long run, none of that is enough.  Because it is not the meadow. It will only bring you moments of peace, leaving you again in the clouds of chronic struggle.

There is a way out of the cloud bank of your mind, back into the joy of being fully alive.  In my next newsletter, we will continue our journey from the cloud banks of our mind back into the joy of being fully awake to the meadow of life.

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