Some of the Worst Things In My Life...
person
Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
I was sitting in my truck yesterday eating lunch when I looked into the little cubby under the radio, where I keep my sunglasses, and I noticed they were gone! They are a pair of prescription sunglasses and cost close to $200!
The area I'm working at has a fair bit of foot traffic so I asked the homeowner how safe my things are if I leave my truck open during the day. She said other people have done work for her and left their's open without anything going missing and that it was a safe neighborhood.
I started imagining the little punk that was walking by and decided to go on a quick shopping spree. I thought about him, yes him, I'm a total misandrist, trying them on and realizing they were prescription and was hoping he would see how wrong he was, have a change of heart and return them. I thought about putting a note on my window expressing the sentiment that you can just return them no harm done. I thought "good, bad, who knows?", they're one prescription behind my current one and maybe I'll go into the eye doctor and they'll find eye cancer in the very early, very treatable stages.
Today my mom texts me, "someone left a pair of sunglasses here, are they yours?" 😐
If I catch that little punk I'm still going to wring his neck!
Comments
Tee Hee,
Good lesson.
In a sense we judge ourselves. Verdict? Innocent.
There I was judging tik-tokkers, when I became addicted to the app. Now removed.
Your little mental mishap reminds me of the empty boat parable..how our auto reaction kicks in and imagination runs wild...at times, I'm also guilty of this too....
This reminds me of when I blamed others for losing my stuff and then realised I had left it somewhere else...
It is completely normal. What is admirable is recognising this and the willingness to go beyond these automatic reactions !
I think once you start imagining things to do with who might have taken your belonging there is a bit of maybe-disguised anger there. It is funny how we extend ourselves by my-making, that loss of a possession is considered damage to the self, how we get angry about this and carry that anger with us.
It’s very human story @person, if it didn’t happen to us anymore we would have lost a bit of ordinariness.
Today I went for a much needed walk on our local common.
Suddenly I was sniffed by Allah. I knew it was Allah because I could hear a voice shouting 'Come here Allah'. Well as you might imagine, when Allah the dog comes sniffing, probably best to mind your own business. Did not want to be A Karen.
Later realised the dog was called 'Ella'. Perhaps.
I've had various similar things with psychotic episodes specifically with delusions. One I remember more clearly a long time ago when I was a young student my delusion was that there were 3 or more types of people and some of them were trying to convert me to their "team". Very similar to 3 different religions but it was more a hidden world that was exposed rather than public familiar religions.
So I was parking my car in a busy student lot and I thought the parking tickets I was receiving were because of these 3 groups trying to mess with me. I didn't have a parking sticker/pass but nonetheless was completely convinced.
After I was getting better from that "episode" I told my psychiatrist about what happened with the parking and he wrote me a letter to take to the student whatever business office and I got out of paying the parking tickets thankfully!
But I've had other things like that having suspicions of things even friends and family that are hard to understand after I am again in remission.
A Buddhist monk was traveling home on a narrow county path one evening. It was becoming dark quite quickly. Suddenly the monk spied something in his path ahead. Unable to make it out, he proceeded with caution. The thing was long, thin, slightly coiled. "Snake!", thought the monk and stopped dead in his tracks. Yet, this was his only path to get home before it was completely dark. The monk experienced a moment of fear and panic, "I must get home soon, before dark! But, the snake is perhaps poisonous. I’m stuck!" he bemoaned to himself. Having some fire making tools, the monk quickly fashioned a crude torch and proceeded carefully forward. Just as suddenly ‘snake’ became ‘rope’. Some previous traveler had obviously dropped a portion of rope on the trail. And, the monk could have easily passed by it without fear. With this realization, how quickly fear became humor, panic to peace and how he had deceived himself with illusion, the monk experienced a sense of enlightenment.
http://www.1netcentral.com/articles/the-snake-rope-essential-buddhist-teaching/
@Jeffrey describes how the rope can become a naga, a dragon.
It is important to see ourselves in these examples that @person illustrated so well. We might say it like so. There is the Super-Buddha
https://www.burmese-art.com/blog/samantabhadra-bodhisattva
and then us
we are the defiled and our best ally. Most of us are pseudo-buddha-badass. We need to be real Buddha Badass.
So for example I experienced fear today. Woke up with it. A 'real' experience that I calm-away-expose. It has a cause (dehydration) and it has a solution - the body gets the solution only when it calms its disproportionate arising.
One of my favourite visualisation methods is tantra demon feeding:
https://www.lionsroar.com/how-to-practice-feeding-your-demons/
I tries to imagine the best. I really do. Increasingly reality follows the mind form. Incredibly the world is a magic Empty that we fill with piss or ambrosia. Most of us are of course of a mixed mind.
Increase Love Inn
It is a difficult thing to let go of your negativities and learn to have more ambrosia in your life. Often ambrosia and the other stuff are intertwined, and you find that when one ceases the other ceases too. Instead, peace comes and overtakes all.