Kindness Cooties or Why I Meditate

*this is a repost from August of 2009 but it’s just as valid today as it was then.  For whatever reason it popped into my head while I was meditating just now so I thought I’d stick it back up front since nobody ever goes all the way back to the beginning of a blog.

Why I meditate.

I want to be kind.  I want to be compassionate.  I want to be the person that makes others feel more peaceful and settled just by sitting in the same space with me.

I want be kind because it is the best possible, most clear, most sensible action to take.  The goal is not to be ‘good’ or avoid Hell (whatever that is) or get extra points for Heaven (whatever that is).  The goal is to have no goal and still be kind.

The meditation part comes in because it is during that practice of intensified mindfulness, I get to begin to penetrate down below what my everyday mind is attached to (it’s one of the cool side effects of regular mindfulness practice).  I recently heard a talk by Shinzin Young (see his youtube videos in the links to the left) in which he talks about the concept of No-self as being like an old CRT monitor displaying a pure white screen.  It’s white when I look at it with naked eye, but if I put a magnifying glass up to it, it breaks down into the pixels of red/blue/green.  So which is it?  Red/blue/green or white?  Well, it’s both depending on the perception, so we could also say it is both and neither. ..or to quote the Heart Sutra “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”.

So when I penetrate deeply enough into my own mind, and see this to be true, the notion of being disconnected from other people, places, things falls away and true kindness emerges.  And true kindness is contagious like a virus, it has an energy of it’s own.  Can you imagine a world infected with kindness?  Kindness cooties…go get some.

Wow, so yeah, my brain was running off at the mouth and I had to get up out the bed and put this stuff down or I’d not be sleeping.  I know I ain’t right.  I was just down at Wanda June’s Hairdo Place and Taco Stand just a couple days ago and she said ‘boy, you ain’t right’, and I said ‘yeah, I know’.

Wanda June is insightful like that.  She don’t meditate, she mostly just smells too many hairdo chemicals.  She got the tallest hair in three counties, ya’ll.  They say the higher the hair, the closer to God.  Maybe she’s got her own enlightenment gig goin’ on.