A very well-known Buddhist tale describes how a young novice asks his revered lama what it’s like to be enlightened. The master surprises him with his answer: “I walk. I sit. I eat.”
The young novice goes away and puzzles over this for a while before returning to say that he, too, walks and sits and eats, but he is far from awakened. To which his lama responds: “When I walk, I walk. When I sit, I sit. When I eat, I eat.”
In other words: mindfully. Attending to what is happening. Being in what neuroscientists call ‘direct mode,’ paying attention to what is happening here and now, coming through our senses, rather than ‘narrative mode’ when we pay attention to what’s going on in our heads. In particular, it’s when we think about ourselves that we really run into trouble.
I love this video of elephants I am sharing and I feel it taps into what many of us sense about these wonderful animals: that, like us, they are intelligent, sentient beings – but, unlike us, they live in the present. Mindfully. When they walk, they walk. When they eat, they eat. When they swim, they swim!
Why is this such a big deal? Why such an inspiration?
Because we tend to do the opposite. Take me and this week for example. It’s been a shocker. I know that some of you may think that, equipped with Buddhist knowledge I must float through a serene existence all sweetness and light, and whenever adversity raise its ugly head, I use it swiftly to propel me to yet further transcendence. That’s what the Dharma is all about, is it not?
Understanding the theory is one thing, however. Practising, quite another. When Amazon, out of the blue, sent me an email reporting a copyright violation, demanding that I prove I was the author of The Queen’s Corgi: On Purpose, and freezing all access to the dashboard for the book until I did, I felt shaken. The email could not have come at a worse time - I had just paid Bookbub to run a promotion for the book requiring me to discount it. Without access to the dashboard, I couldn’t change the price as required.
I will spare you the details of what followed. Except that despite phone calls and emails, my access is still frozen, the ‘copyright violation’ unresolved, and the Bookbub money has gone down the gurgler.
