Contentment Creation

Where Do We Find Peace of Mind?

Dear Friend,

To be content.

Oh.

Playing with semantics. The contents of my mind.

Am I what my mind consumes?

One thing after another. Ever changing. Never, not even in sleep, stopping.

Speaking technically, placing these pixels on the web, is content creation. An identity offers itself, content creator, but what I would like is to create is contentment. Okay, that’s less confusing.

Apologies, like a puppy dog chasing its own tail, this morning I’ve made myself dizzy chasing words. Better to let them come to me.

Contentment is a state of being well now with what is. Loosening the mind and body’s grip on wants and desires.

There are workmen arriving in the street outside, their breath forming clouds around them in the cold morning sunshine. Cigarettes in place and hoods up. Their shadows play against the walls of the building. They stand only a few paces from where I sit at my desk. A hammer is dropped on the pavement, gloves are put on and Zara, our furry house guest curls up on the sofa. A white dog with black ears against the white cushions.

Here’s the scene…

I’m calling my mind home. My heart rate drops, I can feel the warmth of it in the centre of my body. I notice the aliveness in my body. That aliveness is me.

Let’s call it soul.

Soul calls the mind home to the body.

My mind cannot define soul. Soul identity emerges as the mind stills, retreats as the mind distorts, ripples and churns. You can’t see clearly the reflection of the moon when the wind is roiling the surface of the water, only when it is still. Yes, Patrick, I am thinking of you and the I Ching.

Our culture is built on more.

We are encouraged to have desires we can never satisfy. So we suffer want.

When we experience the pleasure of fulfilling a desire, it is fleeting and leads to never ceasing want.

This warm feeling in my heart. I imagine it growing. It expands from this body centre to Zara on the couch. Three hundred and sixty degrees all around where I sit. Travelling outwards to the workmen. They toot the horn of their van, a sliding door thuds.

Keep going with the visualisation. My soul commanding my mind to focus, body still, fingers tapping on the keys. Imagine your heart energy growing, it fills the neighbourhood, the city, the island, continent. It surrounds the earth, I imagine I am in space looking at the blue pearl of our planet.

This is an ancient meditation practice. It takes moments.

We are souls. Extensions of the creative force from which the universe of perception emerges. When we live only on the surface of perception our world distorts and becomes cacophonous. As we dive, as in meditation, the sights and sounds of the world become mute and we enter into a causeless peace.

Peace does not come through the satisfying of desire. Peace emerges as the ground state of reality as we free our minds from the excitation of desire and it’s twin companion, want.

How simple and how in reach, and yet how elusive.

Zara has this whine, as if she is whistling. She runs upstairs to alert Chiara that walk time is imminent. The whine is interspersed with yawning Chewbacca type sounds. She settles on the rug. The workmen are rattling and shovelling and banging around on their scaffolding. The sun has come out for the second day in a row and the remnants of the flu seem to be leaving my body.

Here’s the scene now…

Walk time is upon us.

Till tomorrow

Love

Mikey