Day 26 – The Filing Cabinet in Your Mind

Consider what you’ve been storing in your memory all these years. From birth, consider the movies, TV, and books that you’ve experienced. How many TV commercials have you seen? The number of billboards? The number of friends, bosses, co-workers, girlfriends, boyfriends, and the many other people who have crossed your path? The many tidbits of knowledge that you carry around? We start out with an almost empty and fairly organized filing cabinet in the mind, and proceed to stuff it daily with imaginings, facts, pleasures, worries, conclusions, daydreams, calculations, associations, nightmares, and on and on, for the rest of our lives. Whew. We generate massive amounts of imagery and memories. The closer a computer hard drive gets to its capacity, the slower it operates. The human mind operates the same way, but with other misfires, malfunctions, and dysfunctions. This meditation is about looking at the world in a spontaneous way, with fresh eyes, and a beginner’s mind.

The five colors blind the eye.

The five tones deafen the ear.

The five flavors dull the taste.

Racing and hunting madden the mind. Precious things lead one astray.

Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.

He lets go of that and chooses this.

~Tao Te Ching