Slogan Six

In post-meditation, be a child of illusion.

From the Lojong for the Layperson booklet:

            Shortly after our meditation, we can easily slide back into habitual patterns. But this slogan encourages us to continue to look at the world with fresh eyes rather than fixed ideas. A young child has little experience in the world, and so he sees with eyes of wonder. Our perceptions are based on our presumptions – “this” is like “that,” therefore I should like/dislike it. We become tangled in hope or fear based on a notion from a past incident instead of being present in the here and now. Yet nothing is solid and fixed; everything is continually changing. If we find ourselves waiting in a long line at the bank, we might think “this frustration is going to last forever.” But what happens if we de-familiarize ourselves from the scene? We might take notice of a nearby toddler who is grinning shyly at us. We may hear an unfamiliar noise coming from outside. As we pay attention to each moment that unfolds and shifts around us, we’ll stop worrying about the long line. We will have become a child of illusion.

Photo: Bubble floating above nandina (heavenly bamboo) shrubs.

       As a kid I loved optical illusions, those images that trick our mind into believing something that may not be real. I recently ran across one I hadn't seen before called the Checker Shadow Illusion.  I was so sure what I saw was truth (that the squares weren't the same color), I copied the image into Paint, cut out a section from each square, and then pasted them into a Word document for comparison. Lo and behold, they were the same shade of gray! Of course I wondered if maybe there was something off with my computer monitor. Yet the exercise turned out to be a good example of my preference as an adult for something solid and predictable rather than something indefinite and changeable. Nevertheless, if I can relax and observe - without being in strategy mode, without trying to quantify and label everything - my mind will open to a fresh view of life. And my inner kid would tell me there's a lot more joy in seeing from this perspective.