Saturday 12 March 2011

THOUGHTS ARE WAVES


Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.       (Bruce Lee)

 The sea today is like my mind.
A strong current is dragging me from one wave to another same as my thoughts tend to stray through my whole mind creating pure chaos.
There is no consistent swell today. Only messy stuff over here, some cluttered waves over there and big walls of white water. White water – nothing firm I can paddle through productively because it is just like floating on a cloud. But while working to get through I make no movement forwards. It keeps me in the same place, or even flushes me backwards.
In order to get a good surf I usually hope there is not much white water to fight through and maybe there is even a channel or even better: a break.
It is a pause between the sets of waves, which enables me to paddle straight through.
But there is no channel at this break, and there is no proper swell but it definitely fits because my mind is like the surf today: jerky, in chaos and bulldozing one blurry thought after another.
This is why surfing is my ZEN, I reckon – because thoughts are like waves.
Waves hit me one after another when I start entering the water (likewise I usually get blasted by thoughts once I am entering a proper meditation).
The thoughts are there, hitting me like the white water hits my body while I am paddling out in order to get into the line-up.
The line-up; that’s where I need to be, so I am heading up, whacked by one broken wave after another.
When doing nothing about this liquid bombardment I get pushed backwards again and I have to start paddling all over a new.
Soon, I realize that I have to find a way to leave the white water section behind me – I need to let thoughts, meanings and ideas pass by.
I need to let it all go – and dive through!
So that’s how I do it. I duck-dive through the fluid obstacles one after another, pulling forward and only concentrating on my body.
I can feel every muscle, every working joint inside of me. I can picture what they look like and the complex movements of my diving.
I make my way through the chaotic sea and at the same time through my chaotic mind with all those messed up thoughts and ideas.
Once in the line-up I have time to rest.
I sit down on my board and I feel exhausted.
My breath goes heavily and my body aches for a while.
Out here there is no liquid bombs attacking me. There is just the open choppy sea and myself, so I close my eyes and try to relax. The choppy sea rocks me on my board like a rocking chair and the aerosol fills my lungs with salty air.
Looking at the wide-open sea I cannot come around to compare this infinite horizon with the true infinite nothingness of my mind.
Out here I feel less random thoughts bulldozing me, and the waves I left behind don’t mean a thing anymore.
They feel long gone and I now realize they have had only ONE purpose: to challenge me in letting them go.
"EVERYTHING IS IMPERMANENT” the Buddhism teaches me and I find now that it is true.
Then a set of waves starts coming in.
I can feel the tension of the sea in the air, on the surface of the water, which is starting to bend farther out.
I lie down on my board and start paddling for it.
Like a thought coming up from the very back of my own mind this wave is coming for me.
A plain power is moving towards me, which I know I need to get hold of. I will have to grab it in order to understand.
I paddle for it, there it is right behind me!
I can feel it lifting my back up and pushing me along, and when I feel that power of the sea, I feel the true power of my inner self – the power of my heart.
Here it gets important for one should know that the heart and the mind are not the same. While the mind is what thinks and forms ideas about all kind of things, the heart is what simply is.
This mere energy I feel outside pushes me further along, I gain speed and then I get up on the board.
That very moment, the moment of the drop-in decides everything.
It will decide whether I am able to use that wave, that thought, or whether I will fail.
So if the drop-in goes wrong, I get washed and I have to paddle the whole way back out there.
It is like trying to grab a useful, powerful thought from the heart that shatters on the ground and loses its truthful knowledge.
But this drop-in gets mastered, and when it is mastered I am in the flow.
Everything is in the flow.
I ride this wave, that powerful energy likewise riding a thought.
When riding a thought, I might find time to look at it closely but in the end I discover that it doesn’t matter WHAT they are made of.
The only thing that matters in that very moment is the fact of its mere existence and not what the thought actually contains.
Sometimes I tried to bother them.
I tried to bother the wave, same as I bothered the thoughts about their containments, but it distracted me from being in the flow.
My one-pointed concentration, which comes pretty naturally when I surf, got instable and I failed riding that wave. I had to realize, that this very failed wave, same as my very thought, crashed against the beach break and then faded away into nothingness – it was annihilated.
Frustration, that was the only effect it had on me when I tried bothering its containments.
So today I am paying no attention to its inhibition but merely to its existence itself and it guides me on a fine ride. I feel like I am in a different world with a sense of ease and solitude.
A ride in the flow of a natural powerful energy where I am able to be just me, instead of being attached to something impermanent.
By NOT bothering the thoughts themselves I am able to ride them down and then to let them fade away without fearing that some part of me will fade away, too.
Sometimes, when being out here my mind goes so blank that by the time I come back in, several hours have passed.
I reckon that is why surfing is important for me.
Surfing is my ZEN.
It is a task without a beginning and without an end and the only thing that matters is the absolute passion one puts into a performance and into mere awareness.
This is, where when I come back out of the water I find my mind being clear, clean and at ease.
I finally know what is important for me, what matters to me really instead of what I had been taught. I feel I am not at the mercy of my moody, misguided ideas and thoughts, which spring only from external influences.
I am internal – I just AM.