Evil

Gandhi once said that the only evil in the world is that running around in our own hearts. He then added that that is exactly where the battle against evil should be fought.

While meditating today and experiencing how my mind was wholly in control of my failed attempt to meditate this occurred to me: what could be more evil if not the source of evil than the minds hegemony over my ability to focus, relax, act or think clearly and purposefully. What could be more evil than this conditioned domination of oneself by one's self from within by one's own mind.

Possibly it is even more insidious than that. When we actually believe that most of the thoughts of the mind are essentially one's own we are at least twice removed from our own being, our own freedom and our own presence to the real. That is, we really in such a state can't think authentically and we can't feel about what is happening in the reality of the moment.

Most insidiously when I resign to abiding in mind I can't abide in the loving soulfulness of the Self. In short I make myself vulnerable to the illusion of the windmills that I choose then to fight. When I do fight that fight, I bet a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt.

The Forgetting of Air

Americans don't breath. Thus, the forgetting of air. My title is stolen from a book of the same name by Luce Irigaray. She critiques the thought of Martin Heiddeger and the Western metaphysical tradition. But closer to home Ramana-ji has been talking about the primacy of "space" as it interprets the notion of "consciousness" or "self" in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, especially as understood in the work of Ramana Maharshi.

Consciousness, Ramanaji says, is space become aware of itself. Insofar as space is the place of air, its substance, so to speak, what we possibly have forgotten is the space of air, the place of air. But most importantly, it is the opening to that space in breathing that mediates between space and air. The chest itself expands in space when breathing. It takes in air and expands into space.

It is more than ironic that those of contracted consciousness also contract the chest and lungs and "fail" to breath. They are not aware of their breath except possibly when smoking or when deprived of air.

To see the space of things as opposed to the things in space is to move closer to or deeper in consciousness. The trick is not to turn space itself into another thing. It would be hard to breath in such space.