Wednesday, August 17, 2022

  Wednesday, August 17, 2022

 

         Vince and Julie yelled, "Good morning," as they passed the driveway as I transferred the bush cuttings from the infected shrub myrtle crepe into the trash instead of green waste. I managed to walk around the block again this morning. Sometimes my muscles don't feel up to that challenge. I believe it is because I was waking up muscles that haven't been engaged for years. They go into complaint mode. I give them a day's break.

    I remembered getting a notification that someone else was on my Netflix account, someone from France. Huh! How does someone manage to hack my account? Netflix told me to change my password. I tried, but all the directions were in French. I found a telephone number for Netflix support. They led me through the process after they changed my default language back to English. When I signed on, I got avatar pictures of six people on my account. I couldn't close the screen. I called back. They told me how to delete the other participants. I was not to delete the first one because my history was attached to that participant. The 'primary' member was named Dum-Dum. That sounds about right. I wouldn't have acted this fast if he hadn't changed the language. I had to change this primary member back to my own name. Bye-bye, Dum-Dum.   

   I started a new book by Batchelor, Living with the Devil. I love the way this man thinks and writes. His version of 'the devil' isn't like the Christian version. It is that annoying voice in our head that gets us to think about "sensual desire, discontent, hunger and thirst, craving, lethargy, fear, doubt, restlessness, longing for praise, honor, and fame and extolling oneself while disparaging others." 'The devil' of Buddhism closely resembles the voice Ethan Kross, the neuroscientist and author of Chatter, describes in his book. 

   I resonate with the definitions of 'emptiness' and 'egolessness' as Batchelor defines them from his reading of the original Pali texts. It has to do with letting go of any fixed definition we have of ourselves and accepting that we are in a state of constant flux. When we let go of a precious self-concept, we die -or that version of us dies. We become more open to others because we are not constantly fighting for our own concept of – everything.  

   On the other hand, we do exist; we do have an obligation to preserve ourselves. As S.N. Goenka said, "You are not a vegetable to be sliced." We are not supposed to be passive in the face of life. Buddhism does not address that question. Is it any less moral to allow ourselves to be destroyed than to allow someone else to be destroyed? How do we navigate between the zig and zag of life? The A.A. Serenity prayer comes the closest to addressing that question. It's what I call the narrow path. I'm sure someone else has defined it in the same way. I quickly checked Taoism, which uses the term 'the way.' However abstract my concept is, theirs is even vaguer- go with the universe's flow. What the hell does that mean? Mine has to do with choosing between myself and another person, any other person. That's a little more concrete but no less ambiguous.