Report 72

Mindfulness

http://www.tricycle.com/dharma_talk/3648-1.html: I found this article quite bogus.  It is certainly possible to find beauty in impermanence, or even in a burning house (the beauty is in the caring for those who might be trapped, as well as in the fire itself).  If mindfulness has any point at all, it's about caring more, not caring less.  

To be fair, the article is mostly about beauty as it relates to sense perception and aethetics (whereas I tend to use the word to point at other things), but even there I would emphasize that there is nothing particularly "lack[ing] of worth in mental and physical sensations" -- on a gross level, our mistake is in our attachments and aversions to these perceptions. 

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Reading the above a couple days later, I  wonder what got into me -- wish I could pass it off onto the wrathful deities I saw at the museum the same weekend, but it probably has more to do with my hot-headedness ("my own cussedness" is the way they say it in novels).  Today, I'm in the mood to say that I don't wish to deny the validity of the writer's experiences, just arguing with the way she expresses them.  There is also something right about finding the end of the road.

This morning the thought was about the self not just as a construct but as a simple mistake (in view or concept), and how funny it is that I keep trying to make it "do" things and own things.  Right now, mindfulness seems to be about vividness and the way that vividness knows itself.