Radio Station KFKD

Is the mind worth belief ?

Belief in the products of mind – thought – led to much turmoil and confusion in this life.

The descriptions of similar experiences from others’ accounts – believing what the mind disgorges – constitutes much of fiction, biography, romance and poetry.

Belief in the truth of thought also describes the mind of separation.

Only thought delineates, defines, calls into existence the separate self,
imagined standing apart from everything else.

Recently, picked up a book on creative writing:
Anne Lamott’s BIRD BY BIRD; an excruciatingly funny description of the writing process.

The wild rampage of the mind, set loose and intimately observed by the author, is described with clinical hilarity.

Anne Lamott shares this description in the context of the writing process.
Such experiences in this life formerly seemed almost perpetual !

I need to bring up radio station KFKD, or K-Fucked, here….If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo.

Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of  self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open, and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is.

Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists
of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on.

BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott, p. 116,  Doubleday , New York, NY 1994

Ann Lamott brilliantly lays out out the mind of separation in all its scintillating pathology.

Does this sound as familiar to you as it does to me ?

To carry the radio metaphor further, crossing the Gateless Gate is like dropping the wattage of KFKD by an order of magnitude and radically revamping the playlist, while allowing for gaps of silence here and there.

Your results may vary.

That’s what the Gateless Gate is about: a radical change in the relationship to and sometimes the quality of thought.

I can barely begin to tell you how much easier it became to live with this crazy transmitter after crossing the Gate.

Especially the silence…

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Many thanks to Anne Lamott for this excerpt which has been reproduced unedited and unaltered in any way.

The pic comes from this url; thanks to them for it :

http://greetingsfromtoronto.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/radio-wunderbar-poster-inspiration/

For a post related to this topic:

http://skyeblaine.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/the-voices-in-your-head/