MOST OF US ARE ABSENT IN/TO/THROUGH OUR LIVES

What nonsense the brain thinks. It really is like the girl who collects all the eggs in her chicken coup, and walks into town to sell them, full of fantasies with what she will do with the money, this that and the other, endlessly. I could, if I had more energy than I have, give you more details about the happy scenarios in her head, but the devil’s in the details, they say. This means many things, but right now what I mean by it is that details take up so much damn energy. But to get back to the girl on the bridge: she is so much in her head that she isn’t looking where she is going, trips on something on the road, and all the eggs go smash or into the river.

I observe myself carefully and know I do this. My fantasies are not only happy ones but also terrifying: scenarios of sickness, accidents, maiming, death. I live them out in all their detail. The brain doesn’t conserve or stint with energy when it comes to these details. 

With age I have learnt to snap out of them as soon as I become aware of them. Earlier, I don’t think I was even aware of this tendency in me, and in mankind in general.

We may not be carrying eggs, but our casualty is life itself.  Failure of presence is failure indeed. How few of us even realize that we move absently through our lives; that we create more suffering than we must inevitably get, multiplying it, as it were, like blind, dark math magicians conjuring up ghostly images made of smoke. This life is dreamlike as it is -- how much more unreal are the unending fantasies in our head?

Like Mark Twain said: I have known a lot of trouble in my life that never happened.

Like the Vedas say: don't mistake a rope for a snake, or a snake for a rope. 

 Like Rumi says, Abstain from distracting thoughts, abstain! RUMI