It Sees Me

"This is not the way it should be."

That thought comes often of late. It might be about the war, or the weather, or the roads, or school, or my belly, or a plethora of other things that dissatisfy. The vague feeling that something fundamental needs to - is about to - change is my constant companion. It's not an Obama kind of change or a new mission statement from the sprawling bureacracies in which we all live - it's more like waking up one day and realizing that the colors you've been seeing all your life are actually wrong, and today, for some reason, you can see them all as they truly are. As you take that in you realize that your socks have never matched your outfit - not once. You also see that roses are actually green, and the sky is a pale pink, and your raisin bran is a purplish color - which wouldn't be so bad if the milk wasn't bright orange.

This kind of change - a fundamental shift in the perception of reality - is what I'm being confronted with right now. No, not confronted - threatened is a better way to describe it. A view of it all threatens to leap out and crush the comfortable samsara I've created for myself. The sudden knowledge that IT is not as I thought, or as I believed, or even as I've imagined it could be is startling, and hopeful, and full of the fearful anticipation of having to learn everything over again.

Trying to not look doesn't help. Staying busy doesn't either. Wearing sunglasses to block eye contact, and an iPod to block out sound - also futile. It's behind my eyelids and in my dreams and in the Xbox and on my credit card statement and in my gas tank and on your hair. It's within these symbols that you recognize as letters corresponding to sounds that make the words that stand for ideas that convey this blog post to your mind. It's in thinking of yourself as an entity with a mind, or a mind within an entity, and it wants you to see itself, in all it's prickly truth, in the bright pink sunshine.

So far, I'm not a fan of reality getting uppity like this with me. I admit I asked for it, what with all the meditating and the reading and the thinking, but I figured it was like the lottery - how many people actually win? Now that it has taken notice and looked me right in the eye, I'd like to quietly go back to stumbling toward death in the meaningless fashion to which I am accustomed. Even though I know it's an illusion, I like my socks to match.