Aidrian O’Connor 
  
 
Hey Steryl, 

How’s things? Everything’s okay here, though I’m sorely missing my response on the first packet. I assume that you did indeed receive it, but were unable to return it to me because I totally spaced out on putting a SASE in with the packet when I sent it. I guess I was too used to just walking over to Vicki Kirsch’s house when me packets were done last semester (she lives about fifteen minutes away from me by foot). Anyway, I’ll be sure to put two SASE’s in this time, in case both packets cannot fit into one envelope. 

Anyway, I feel infinitely better about this packet than the last one. Shortly after fully realizing my dissatisfaction with trying to work with intellectual/scholarly authors, I decided to fall back on the writings of Tibetan Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa. I decided on working with his book The Lion’s Roar; An Introduction to Tantra, because it seemed as if this book most related to my urge to work with a systematized understanding of the various stages of self-transformation. Last semester I tried working with one of Trungpa’s books and became ultimately frustrated, as I was trying to approach his work from the aspect of taking notes on his words, instead of blending my own understanding with his, and consequently meeting his words half way. This time I took a different route all together. Over the course of two or three days, I would read one chapter from the book at least three times, and sometimes more. Then, after having thus kept the ideas presented in the chapter in the back of my mind (and sometimes in the front), for a few days, I would sit down and write my own experiential understanding of the subjects discussed by Trungpa. The end result, I feel, is of much more value to myself than the basic note taking work that half of my packet consisted of last time, even though on paper there is a smaller amount of actual material. 

On another note, I tried sitting down last night and going through my various resources on Alchemy, in hopes of perhaps returning to my originally intended direction for this semester. Sad to say, I was not inspired in the least. What I was most interested in working with in Alchemy was how the Alchemists understood that the transformative process unfolded in various stages, from start to finish. What I found is that nowhere is a definite system of steps laid out. Instead, the meanings of various symbols are dealt with, and it is left to the individual to discover the steps by working through understanding the symbols. Frankly, understanding this process as fully as I had hoped to would apparently require years of Alchemical work, which is nothing that I am presently prepared for. I could easily enough redirect my course of study to understanding various symbols in Alchemy, as there is a plethora of information on that subject, but I don’t think that’s quite what I am interested in for the moment. As far as I can tell, that would lead to more black and white note taking, and little creative response. 

What I have worked with in this packet specifically, is the first three yanas of Tibetan Tantra. These three yanas deal with the hinayana and mahayana path of Buddhism, which are actually the stages that occur before one moves into the tantric, or vajrayana, stage. I assume that you have some familiarity with these ideas, but if not, that should be okay as well. I’m trying to learn to write for people who have no real prior knowledge of these subjects, so it would be just as interesting to get a response from a person who is ignorant of such things as from a person who is educated about them. Because I feel that I have a little living experience with the hinayana and mahayana paths, I felt alright writing about them in the way that I have - that is from an assumed basis of personal understanding. I found, however, that as I moved into Trungpa’s relation of the tantric yanas, this personal experience and understanding dropped away for the most part, and consequently, I did not write about what I read. The exception to this is the last section of this packet, written on mahamudra, which is something I do feel I have witnessed to a small degree in my own life. 

The first section of this packet is a response to a metaphor which was originally suggested to me by a friend and fellow Goddard student, Rebecca Gilley. I basically took her original metaphor and expanded and changed it to fit my own understanding. She has reviewed this piece, with positive results. 

That’s all for now. I hope that this work is acceptable to you. Not having received my first response yet, I feel like I’m wading into dark water with no idea of what is expected of me... 

Take care, 

Aidrian 

  
Crossing the River; 
A Response to Rebecca 
 
 
In some ways, our journey through life can be related to crossing a river. Birth is the moment when we take the first step off of the riverbank into the flow of moments and events which are life itself. There is something tricky, and somewhat magical about this journey from one shore to another, and it is that trickiness that I want to explore here today. 

For many of us, walking across the river is fairly straightforward. It has it's deep points, where we fear that the flow of the river is going to just carry us away, and it has it's shallow points, where we feel a little more secure and in control. But either way, we just keep walking step by step, and life flows on, and eventually we die. This is the way it is for those people who never take a hard look at the river, and their relation to it. Not taking a long hard look at the river is perfectly okay for some people, and in fact works better for them than living any other way. 

There is another type of person, however, who finds it necessary to really watch closely each step that they take, and it is these people that start to experience the tricky part that I briefly mentioned earlier. They find that, because they are no longer just taking each step, but really watching each step that they take, they become just slightly removed from the river itself. Now they see something totally different - that they are, in fact, walking on the surface of the river itself. Each time their foot falls onto the surface of the river, a little sheet of ice forms under their foot. This experience is both fascinating and frightening at the same time, and has several different effects on the people who witness it. 

What has happened here is that the walker has, in a certain way, removed him or herself from the river, and is now more conscious of the actual process of walking than they are of the events which are flowing past them. This certain fear starts to grow in the walker - that the ice won't form under this particular step, and the walker will plunge back into the chaotic flow of life that the river represents. This fear can cause the walker to hesitate, to not want to put his or her foot down at all, but instead to just stand still, safe on the ice that they know is secure. But then the walker finds something horrible - that he or she cannot stop walking, even if they want to. It seems like there is some intrinsic force which makes the walker walk. 

The walker can respond in two ways, once he or she realizes that they are not the ones who are in control of their own stepping. First, they can say, "OK, I see that I am along for the ride here. Let's see what happens." Or they can freak out, and start to try to fight against the urge to walk, to take the next step. When this happens, bad things follow. The walker becomes so caught up in his or her fight against the inevitable that they drive themselves to distraction, quite literally. Every step that falls seems eternally drawn out and painful, with the constant expectation of what seems will be a definite plunge through non-existent ice back into the dark swirling waters below. The walker at this point is fighting for all that he or she is worth, screaming, "I don't want this!" The sad part is, they are so caught up in fighting against each step that they don't even have time to notice what it is that is happening, what they are screaming that they don't want. 

Closely related to this is trying to control one's steps to lead oneself toward a different part of the river, a part that one has become aware of because of the new vantage point of walking on top of the river. Once again, we are not the one who controls the walking, but here we are trying to act like we are. Just like with the prior problem, something bad happens - we end up struggling towards something that we can not reach, and we become frustrated, and ultimately, distracted. 

The two above examples are, of course, simply fearing what might happen, and hoping for something to happen. In either case, it is simply resisting what is going to happen, what is actually happening. Once this cycle of resistance begins, it is very hard to break it. It can, however, be broken at any moment, simply by taking the first attitude towards the inevitable step that was discussed above, i.e., "Ok, I see that I am along for the ride here. Let's see what happens." As soon as one takes this attitude, the whole situation changes. Now the walker has a different point of view on the events which are flowing by him or her in the river, a sort of vantage point. From this vantage point it is possible to see that one's position in the river is not the only possible position, that there are other ways of viewing the river. Seeing the river this way is not a better way to see it than from actually standing in the river - it's just different, and that's all there is to it. 

Unfortunately, there is also a great danger in standing on the surface of the river that we have not yet discussed, and this danger is not so straightforward as our hopes and fears, although it is certainly very closely related. From up above, it is so easy to become distracted looking around, wondering what it might be like to be a part of the river in some other place. We could spend time trying to look back at where we came from, the steps that we have already taken. Or we could focus on trying to see the yonder shore, and become fascinated with it as the goal of our journey. Also, we might decide that because we are walking on the water, and everyone else seems to be below us in the flow, we are somehow better than them. This is the idea that our vantage point somehow increases our value as people, as if we had a choice about the fact that we happen to be where we are. All of these actions have the same outcome as becoming caught up in fighting against the urge to step where we must - we become distracted from what is actually going on with the part of the river that directly concerns us. All of the moments keep flowing by, but we are off thinking about where we have been, or where we are going to, or how great it is to be what we are, and meanwhile we are missing the moments, our moments, all together. 

The walker does not have to become distracted at all though, and really, that's the whole point. He or she can find themselves on their vantage point, being aware of the magical aspect of the ice forming under every step, and still concentrate fully on every moment that the river brings by. And now, because they are no longer fully immersed in the river, they can appreciate the river because they have seen another side of it, seen it from a slightly removed stance. When the walker manages to avoid all of the possible distractions and just focus all of his or her attention on what is in the river right here, right now, they begin to enter into the river fully once more. What I mean is, although they have gained a vantage point and are standing on the surface of the river, because all of their mind is filled with what is occurring in the river, they fully become what the river is, and they are in effect standing back in the river where they started from. 

  
Shravaka Yana 

Let's talk about the nature of pain. Pain is reality. That's something that we don't want to hear, that we don't want to believe, but the fact is, just by simply being conscious, by being alive, there is an aspect of uncomfortableness, a constant wearing. That is unavoidable. Even our experiences of pleasure are tainted by this pain, which is always lurking in the background. We as human beings cause so much rapid growth and change in this reality, or at least it seems so when we compare ourselves to the other non-human beings that we can observe around ourselves, and perhaps it is our constant irritation by existence which causes us to grow and change so quickly. Either way, it doesn't matter too much, because the pain, the irritation, is there, and it is not going to go away. 
  
Let's explore this pain a little further. The pain that I am talking about can be found in anything that we do, but sometimes we are more aware of it, and sometimes we are not so aware of it. The Buddhists define three separate types of pain - inherent pain, pain of change, and what is called the pain of pain. The first pain, inherent pain, is the type of pain I talked about above - the kind that is simply a product of being, of never being absolutely and fully at ease with ourselves in the most true sense of the term. The second kind of pain is that which relates to being in a pleasurable state, but being forced out of that pleasurable state by circumstances beyond our control. This relates to wanting to stay in our safe little worlds, the worlds we know and understand, but being forced to move into a situation which is unknown and thus uncomfortable. The pain of pain is the kind we experience when we are already experiencing pain, and then more pain comes on top of that. This seems to be expressed well with the adage, "When it rains, it pours." You are already in an unfortunate circumstance, and then the situation seems to worsen and worsen more. 

You might wonder why must we say that there is always pain. The reason for this relates to the fact that there is nothing which is ever permanent in our reality, but we would like very much to be able to find something which is permanent - some solid ground to stand on and say, "Yes, here I am." It seems as if this need to secure a solid place, to freeze impermanence into something we can grab onto and hold as our own, is intrinsic to our very nature. It seems to be the way that our conscious mind operates, and if we view our conscious minds as analyzers and organizers, it only makes sense that we would operate this way. How else can an analytic machine work but to attempt to establish hard fact to base its analyzations on? How can one hope to organize absolute chaos? We can only try to freeze one moment of that chaos, and then try to assign some pattern of recognition to that single frozen moment. Of course, our minds take the bit of chaos that they think they understand, and begin to work off of what they observe in that moment. By doing this, we set ourselves up for pain, because we begin to make theories and assumptions based on a frozen moment which has already come and gone. By the time we start to believe in what we saw and thought that we understood, everything, being absolutely impermanent, has already changed. We want more than anything to hang onto what we think that we know, however, and consequently, the changing reality begins to grate on the already defunct theories that we have established. And because we form these theories, over and over again, our conscious minds are constantly grating away at the chaotic flow of reality. This wearing action, the grating, is the inherent pain that I am talking about. It is not particularly pleasant, in fact not pleasant at all, but it is the way that we seem to work. 

What does one do if there is only pain? How can one have hope if there is only pain? Indeed, what does one do. We can do one thing only, if we ever hope to come to terms with ourselves and our realities, and that is to accept the pain fully. Now, this is much easier said than done, because it is so easy for us to say, "Yes, I acknowledge that life is pain.... " but then wait for the pain to go away, thinking that our supposed acceptance of the pain will make it fade away. But this is just us fooling ourselves into believing that we can still escape from the pain. We are playing a subtle game with ourselves at this point, consciously trying to tell ourselves that we understand that life is pain, but only doing so because we think that to do so will help us escape from the pain. It will not, and if we play this game, it is easy to catch ourselves, especially when we start to think things like, "I know that life is pain, goddamit! Why am I still so damn frustrated with it," or "I've known that life is pain for a long time now - why hasn't the pain started to fade yet?" Thoughts like these are sure signs that one has not yet learned to fully accept the pain that is inherent in life. 

We must accept the pain fully, two hundred percent, if we ever hope to learn to work with reality. To do otherwise would be like trying to paint a picture, but not being willing to use pigment in the paint. Being willing to accept the pain is being willing to admit that you will always be trying to build a sand castle in a torrential downpour, that your conscious mind will always try to grab onto and hold something that will always - every single time -slip through your fingers. By accepting such a thing fully, we can become aware of something besides just the frustration we normally experience. We can become aware of how much aggression we are treating ourselves and our reality with because of our constant attempts to escape from the frustration of pain. 

Pratyekabuddha Yana 

We have an in-built security system as conscious human beings. The purpose of this security system is to prevent any type of threat from entering into our worlds. A threat here would be defined as something which would shake up our notion of what we ourselves are, and what our world is. This relates to the prior yana in that this security system is the part of us which gives us the ability to live inside our constant theories of what we are, what the world is, while the outside world continues to change around us. It is the part which let's us grasp onto a certain type of understanding, which the world then begins to wear away at, which then causes the pain and frustration that we have already discussed. 

The Buddhists have divided this security system into five successive stages, called skandhas. The five skandhas are called, respectively, form, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness. These five stages are occuring in every moment, and span from our first subconscious awareness to the complex experience of conscious emotion. 

To begin with, we start with a basic fundamental ignorance. This is ignorance in the literal sense of the term, i.e. ignore - ance. Prior to this, we have already formed our idea of self and world, and this initial stage works to actively ignore anything which might be considered threatening to our pre-conceived notions. The reason that we feel we must, at all costs, preserve our notions of self and world is that the only way that we have to define who and what we are, that we really and truly exist, is to associate our actual selves with the theories that we have created. If those theories are not one hundred percent believable, than we can not believe in our selves one hundred percent. Ego will go to any length to assure itself of its own solid existence, which, as we learned in the last yana, does not solidly exist at all. So this first stage of ignoring is well established, deep in our subconscious minds, and censors all information that would be threatening long before we have conscious knowledge of the phenomena occurring around us. 

The second stage, after this initial censoring, is also below conscious level, although it is just on the other side of the dividing line between conscious and subconscious. This stage could be compared to a radar array, which senses what is in the field of reality, where we stand in comparison to everything around us. This stage is similar to the last, in that it is searching for threats to ego, but in the first case, the censoring act was more self-contained and based more on defining our selves to ourselves. Here there sense of self is more firmly established, so the focus becomes the surrounding territory. Once again, the radar is feeling out the area, attempting to determine how threatened or safe we are in the current situation. 

The third stage, perception, is closely linked to what we experience as intuition. We have gotten a basic idea of what is in the environment prior to this stage, and here we take a closer look at what we are projecting the environment to be. We see if there is some way to alter the projections slightly, so that they will more easily fit into our grand theory, so that they will become even less threatening to what we think we know. This is the point at which we decide whether or not we will be able maintain ourselves in the face of this particular phenomena, and thus whether or not we are willing to work with it. 

Intellect is the forth stage. This stage is the one which is most commonly associated with ego's entire purpose, i.e. the labeling and categorization of data. Here we are assigning specific meaning to different phenomena, all of which has been censored and interpreted enough already so as not to shake up our understanding of what the possible labels and categories are. This is a fairly conscious activity, although many times we do not pay too much of our attention to the fact that we are doing this. In the way that we are giving definite labels to things, we are finalizing for ourselves what we believe those things truly are, and in an absolutely massive way, we are limiting how we will deal with that particular part of reality in the future. Once we have assigned a label to something, we refuse to re-label it, unless we can manage to do so and in no way jar our system of organization. 

The final stage is consciousness, and consciousness is here defined as emotions. Emotions are the line of thinking which we consciously experience all the time and associate our selves with. Emotions are our last line of defense against threats. Despite the fact that we have been so careful up to this point to manipulate all phenomena into a non-threatening form that we can easily understand, we are still very shaky and unsure of our selves. We do not trust anyone or anything, and we are always waiting for a non-threat to become a threat. So emotions are our personal conscious weapon, giving us the ability to react instantly against those things which are changing to represent something threatening. As things begin to change both on the outside and the inside they put stress on our labeling system, but we are unwilling to admit that anything is changing on the inside. We don't want to think that the inside can change much, because then we would have to question who and what we are, so we put the blame on that which is outside. This is where we begin to treat our environment with severe aggression, striking out at anything which shakes us up and makes us feel insecure, makes us question what we think we know. It is this purpose that emotions serve for us. 

This whole business is based on taking actual phenomena and projecting meaning onto it in order to make it line up with our pre-conceived notions, because we associate our selves with those notions and we want more than anything to believe in our selves. This is why meditation is of utmost importance - it gives us a break from being caught up in our belief of our selves, and lets us experience first hand the transitory aspect of our selves. It lets us see that we are not anything definite at all, but instead are changing every moment, like the world which surrounds us. 
 
  
Revolution as Dawning Mysticism; 
Tathagatagarbha 

Before delving into this subject, I want the definition of the word "mysticism" as it is used here to be clearly understood. Mysticism in any culture seems to suggest that there is some other mode of being, a new form of consciousness, which can be taken on by the practitioner, or "mystic". This mode of being is directly related to the way in which the mystic perceives his or her environment. In fact, it could be said that the only thing which truly changes when a person enters into the realm of mysticism is his or her perception of the environment, which relates directly to the way the mystic views their own role in that environment. This change in understanding one’s role alters not only the relation to the environment, but also fundamentally changes the way one relates to one’s self. Depending on which tradition one comes from, the mystic may change the relation to one’s self first, and then find a change occurs in how he or she relates to the environment, or vice versa - it really doesn’t matter either way, and it is possible that these two changes occur at the exact same time. 

If we have followed the Buddhist path, we have dealt mainly with the hinayana path up until this point, which is very self-centered and relates more to dealing with one’s self before turning to the outside realm. But now, if we have come to a full understanding of the nature of pain, and we also understand how we personally manifest the five skandhas, we are ready to turn towards the world that surrounds us. Let’s take a look at how this process begins to unfold. 

To begin with, before we ever came to the hinayana path, or Buddhism at all for that matter, we were fully caught up in ourselves. We could only perceive our version of the world around us, the meanings which we projected onto external objects, and as such we had no grasp on the fundamental truth of what was occurring. Even though we were dealing with the outside world, the way in which we dealt with it was very self-centered - ultimately self-centered, in fact. The moment we began to question our own involvement in the environment, this self-centered approach began to waver, though only slightly. This initial questioning period is when most of us begin to look to exterior sources of knowledge, such as traditions and religions, in order to help us try to formulate a better understanding of our own role in the surrounding environment. 

Realizing the nature of pain is the first baby step that we actually take in moving away from a self-centered approach. At that point, we hadn’t yet become any less self-centered, but we had removed ourselves from ourselves by just a tiny bit, say one eighth of an inch - just enough to be able to catch a glimpse of ourselves. This stage is still very self-centered, because our focus is still totally inward, but before we can turn outward, if we are to follow this particular tradition, we must learn to understand what process is unfolding on the inside. So we remove ourselves from ourselves just enough that we can catch a glimpse of what we are. That glimpse is, of course, not very pleasant. We find with that first glance that we are suffering and in pain. Once we learn to accept that pain, not to fight against it and run for cover, we become slightly more removed from ourselves - another eighth of an inch. Now, we can see through that first initial layer of pain that surrounds us, and we can start to see more of ourselves than just the pain. We can take a good solid look at ourselves and see what we do, how we act, and how we behave. When we take that solid look, we find the five skandhas, i.e. we discover how we project ultimately irrelevant meaning onto the exterior world. Once we have a solid understanding of how we do that, we come to the standpoint I wish to discuss. 

What we have done by removing ourselves from ourselves by just one quarter of an inch is to realize that we are not the pain or the skandhas. Those things are definitely there, definitely part of us, but there is something else besides those things. In fact, there must be, because if there was only the pain and the skandhas, then there would be no reference point to realize what we are doing. What I mean is that if we were the skandhas fully, then there would be no way to realize what the skandhas were, because we wouldn’t know of anything but the skandhas. So now we are sitting one quarter of an inch away from ourselves, watching ourselves cycle through the skandhas. We are watching our own egos, because the ego is nothing else besides the skandhas cycling over and over. But if we are outside our ego’s even by just one quarter of an inch, then what are we? What is the consciousness that we are residing in now? 

The name which the Buddhists have given this consciousness is tathagatagarbha. We can see tathagatagarbha manifesting in ourselves any time that we question ego’s action. Tathagatagarbha is the very first inkling of the preparation to turn from our wholly self-centered approach to an approach which is based on the outside world. It is true that tathagatagarbha is still focusing it’s efforts on watching the ego, and as such is self-centered, but what it is doing in effect is blowing the whistle on ego, who is the true culprit of keeping us ultimately self-centered. What it does is say to ego, "You’re not doing a good enough job keeping the shop. You are trying to keep the truth hidden for your own sake." 

Tathagatagarbha is in fact, a voice of revolution against the governing aspect which ego has taken for itself. As already discussed, ego is minding the shop, running things, and it wants to make sure that nobody else has a chance to take away it’s position of power. So it effectively censors the media - it strains out any incoming information that might adversely effect its good standing, by using the five skandhas. But now there has come these new young upstarts, who have managed to separate themselves from the shop enough to get an exterior view of what ego is up to. This is sort of like living in a country where you are aware of all the ills of the neighboring country’s government, but the people who actually live in that country never hear a thing. You, of course, can see how much the people on the inside are missing, but they have no idea because they have only been inside the country, aware of only what they have been told. But, as stated, now this new group of young ones has managed to visit the neighboring lands, and they know that something is not quite right at home. 

Now there are several ways to react to a situation of oppression, whether it be oppression by an actual government or oppression by one’s own ego (they are really very similar). The initial reaction is often, "Let’s have a revolution, kill the bastards who would hold us down." What usually happens if this action is taken is that the government calls in the army and squashes the revolution utterly. You see, they have been in power for quite some time, and frankly have more resources than the would-be revolutionaries. This holds true for our little inner revolution as well - if tathagatagarbha were to try to fight ego directly, the fight itself would simply feed ego and make it put up its defenses all the more. So the revolutionary force must employ a different tactic all together, the tactic that Trungpa calls "luring an enemy into your territory." (Pg 103) 

Ego values territory highly. It could be said that it values it more than anything else. So, tathagatagarbha studies ego closely, watches it's every move, and comes to understand it's workings inside and out. And when ego comes to take away tathagatagarbha's territory, tathagatagarbha gives it willingly. This is because territory means nothing to tathagatagarbha, has no value what so ever. So ego takes more and more territory, and tathagatagarbha gives more and more, all the while watching closely. Eventually, ego begins to wear itself thin and burn itself out. It has taken so much territory that it has frankly worn itself out. When it has finally worn itself out, it drops away, and only tathagatagarbha is left behind. Once this has occurred, tathagatagarbha can finally turn its attention to the outside world, and see what surrounds it without the intervening censor of ego and the five skandhas. 

By going through this process, the practitioner has effected a change in his or her consciousness. The practitioner is now free to begin to deal with the environment in a way which was never accessible before now - on a level of simple truth. Because this basic change has occurred, this fundamental step has been taken, the practitioner can perceive the world in a wholly new way, and as such, this taking of this step hallmarks the dawn of mysticism. Now the practitioner can go on to work in this new magical realm of perception, which is not magical in any fantasy book type of way, but is definitely magic in the most ordinary everyday sense of the term. 

 
Mahamudra 
 
The man sat midway down a long hallway, his tiny desk pushed against the wall. Along the wall behind him ran one continuous row of yellow-grey filing cabinets, more filing cabinets than he wanted to think of. There was no particular sound besides that of his working, and, of course, that of his breathing. The late afternoon sun streamed in through the slitted blinds which covered the lone window at the far end of the hall, the warming light apparently the only saving grace in this austere environment. Occasionally he would lift his head from the work before him, gaze for a moment into the too bright light, sigh a deep breath, and then turn back to his task. 

The company kept a seemingly endless number of files - stacks upon stacks of paper sheets, crammed into metal boxes like the cabinets behind him, which lined every available wall space throughout the office. The majority of the paper sheets, covered with what was apparently considered to be invaluable information, were never even looked at anymore, but the company insisted that they must be kept, "Just in case..." Just in case what wasn't too clear, but it really wasn't the man's job to make such decisions. He was paid only enough to do what he was told without verbalizing that voice which repeated, "This is senseless" over and over again behind his eyes. Finally though, the office had run out of space for new filing cabinets, and the company had been forced to decide which priceless files were less priceless than the others in order that new files full of more priceless information could be put in their place. So it was to the man that this task of removing the less valued files befell. He was given a list of numbers, and told to remove and dispose of all of the files labeled to match the numbers on the list. 

Because he could not stand so much waste, the man decided that it was his responsibility to pick through each file, and ensure that all of the white paper ended up in a recycling bin, that all the paper clips were recirculated into the office supply cabinet, as with the floppy disks, yellow file holders, green hanging file folders, plastic GBC binders, three ring binders, and on and on and on. While working on the files, it was almost impossible for the man not to think of other nations in the world, where people couldn't afford to pay veritable fortunes of wealth for information like the office he worked in sold at such a high price. He couldn't help but think of how he felt poor making $60 a day, but most people in the world still made less than $2. And he also couldn't fight off the thoughts of the natural resources the Earth offered her children, rapidly being wasted away by firms like the one that he worked for, and all for such a convoluted, and to all appearances unnecessary, end. 

"But this is the world I live in," he would remind himself with a shrug, before despondency set in. The way that he looked at it, at this point the karmic ball of humankind was rolling, and he was nothing but a speck of dust on it's surface. In that position, no matter how he strained himself, there was nothing he could do to stop the boulder from rolling off the quickly approaching cliff. Still, he couldn't hope but try, and it was at his own insistence that he pick through the files to recycle what could be recycled. Only two days ago, one of the company's high executives happened by as he sat at his task, and told him not to waste precious time with such a thing, but just to throw it all it the trash heap. He simply and quietly refused, and the executive, to the man's surprise, silently went on his way. 

Now, to some degree at least, he was paying the price for his good intentions. Behind him and before him stood countless hours of flipping through endless file after file, practically one page at a time. He had secured several different boxes, which he placed in an organized fashion in close proximity to his little desk, so that he could toss the various types of materials into them easily. Closest were those two boxes which filled the most quickly of all - the recycling bin for white paper, and the trash bin. Yes, despite his attempts, the trash bin was still filled quickly with items which he could find no second use for. Other bins sat beyond those two - the hanging file bin, the yellow file bin, and beyond that, just within reach of a short toss, the great miscellaneous bin, which would have to be picked through and organized at some later time. 

So his day dragged on, sheet of paper by sheet of paper, the same movements enacted over and over with such redundancy that they could only become reflexive, automatic. His eyes would identify a paper clip, and his hands would whip it off the paper and chuck it toward the great miscellaneous bin in one smooth motion, while in the same instant his eyes would already be searching for the next item to identify and categorize. His fingers learned to quickly ascertain the presence of an unrecyclable cardstock divider hidden deep in a three inch stack of paper, which would necessarily be snatched out and placed in the trash while the rest went in the recycling bin. It was obvious how easy it would be to just tune out, let his mind drift while his hands did the work, and fantasize about anything but the dusty smell of old dry paper. 

That is one thing, though, that the man didn't want to do. He yearned on the one hand to be anywhere but here at this uninteresting, if noble, task. But on the other hand he felt that it was his absolute duty to try to really be here in the long shadows of the hall with the dusty old files and the sound of his breathing. He didn't really know if others around the office felt the same way, but he knew that for him, at least for now, there could be no other way. He felt like this situation that he was in, what could be called a dull everyday situation, was indeed dull and everyday. But it was also the only situation that he had, and because of that, he felt that it deserved enough respect for him at least to do his best to pay attention to it. He was quite sure that others would laugh at him for taking such an attitude towards such a supposedly brainless task, but he figured that was okay too. 

Certainly, sometimes paying close attention to such a task, or any task, was easier said than done. It seemed to the man that it was the nature of the human mind to wander away from the real world to a fantasy realm built of thoughts, and he was constantly needing to remind himself to be present. As time wore on, though, he found it easier and easier to just be generally mindful of whatever was at hand, and sometimes he wondered if he would ever stop having to pull his mind back to the real world. But part of him knew that dealing with his mind wandering off was the whole point to the exercise, and having to go through the process kept him present in a subtly different way. 

So as he sat, sorting through the stacks, his mind would sometimes wander, and he found that it kept wandering to the same place over and over again. The subject it seemed to enjoy so much today was one which he had wondered about many times before, and sometimes he even felt like he had experienced the idea in his actual life. 

"The idea is really pretty simple - if one pays close attention all the time to one's life and the events that are occurring around one, then one begins to take each specific event that occurs as a sort of indicator as to what action one should take," he thought to himself. Just then, he was distracted from his thoughts by a little labelling sticker, which had lost its glue over the years, and fell off of the file which was in his hands. It was white, with a little yellow stripe on it. This was a new item, something he had not yet categorized before. 

"Do I recycle it, or throw it out?" he wondered. It was so small, and had weird brown glue residue on it, as well as a yellow stripe. That was three points against it going in the recycle bin, which was supposed to contain only regular white paper. He shrugged and tossed it towards the trash can. Being small and almost without weight, it fluttered around a bit in mid-air, and ended up falling to the left of the trash can rim, and right into the recycle bin. The man noticed out of the corner of his eye, raised his eyebrow a bit, and his hands went back to their task. His mind went back to thinking about the idea. 

He liked to compare the attitude he was thinking about to being in a movie. "You are one of the actors," he thought, "and you don't know any of your lines. But, the plot director is very intelligent, super-intelligent in fact, and he has directed everyone and everything else in the film to give you little hints, so that you can pick up what your correct place is." 

Another one of the little filing labels fell off of an old file, and quickly, without thinking about it, he scooped it up and moved to send it into the trash can. As he let go of the bit of paper, however, it didn't let go of him. It seemed as if static electricity had suddenly caused it to cling to his fingers. He stopped in his thinking, smiled a little smile, and dropped the label into the recycling bin where it lay near its predecessor. He reached for another file and another thought. 

"As you go along, the film unfolds around you and you unfold with the film. Now, obviously, if you don't pay very close attention to everyone and everything in the film, you're going to miss your cues, and not know what your rightful place is. Then, chances are you're going to foul the whole film up altogether. That's when the film starts to get very messy, because the plot director starts using more and more sever means to try to register your attention..." and on and on he thought. 

He was really into some good thinking now it seemed, and was almost excited about where his mind was leading itself. Meanwhile, yet another little label had fallen off a file onto the brown desk, where his eyes identified it without him thinking about it, and his hand scooped it up. As the reflex action of his arm moved the piece of paper in the direction of the trash can, his arm suddenly collided with the raised edge of the desk, stopping it short. His attention snapped back with the sudden jarring of his arm, and the first thing he noticed after the short jolt of pain was the piece of white file label sitting in his open hand. He laughed out loud this time, and dropped it into the recycling bin. 

"And it's all based on the ability to just pay close attention," he thought with a smile, and decided that it was time to take a break from thinking for a little while. 

The last fading rays of the winter sun cut the dusty air in the long hall, and the only sound was that of the man's working, and, of course, that of his breathing.