At this level of my being I tap into the stories, concepts, images and thoughts that whir about within me.  As I self-reflect I notice some anxiety (at the level of the manomaya kosha) about finishing this post knowing that I have little time in the next few days to do so.  At a subtler level there is a belief that drives the anxiety.  The belief is that if I don't get it finished and readers are expecting a post that I will have failed in some way.   As I try to stay with this belief it gets bumped out by random images of the potato soup I am cooking upstairs and a curiousity about where my cat is after being MIA for a few hours.   The fodder and filler of this sheath flies in and out of awareness from moment to moment.  As I rest in the awareness of the fleeting nature of thoughts and images.  I am reassured that the belief that I will be a failure for not completing this post soon is not substantial;  It is not a Truth sent forward to me from the cosmos.  Rather, it is a random spark of energy rising in my consciousness. The non-dual tradition is particularly clear about this.  Thoughts rise out of silence and fall back into silence.  They are birthed out of the Great Mystery, live their life cycle and die. (Just follow a thought back to it's Source to see what I mean).  But, sometimes the ego doesn't let thoughts come and go.  Like the emotions and feelings of the emotional sheath, ego tends to make beliefs into something they're not.  It makes them into Truth's.  They become reified iron cages; prisons that within which we operate, half alive and in constant fear that we may somehow violate this "Truth".   The non-dual tradition invites to into a state of listening and it is here that we begin to see the fleeting nature of the content of our mental sheath, and the egoic function of the mind that tries to interrupt this natural flow.  

I have spent many years exploring, understanding and cultivating stories about myself and reality.   It has been an exquisite journey and an incredibly important one.   It is important in that the more I have explored the more I have realized that there is no end to it.  I will not find ultimate truth. I will not find that substance of Rightness which I can claim as my own; giving me a foothold in reality and superiority over my fellows.  Like Socrates' ultimate conclusion; we will never really know the ultimate truth of things .  So the mental sheath is starting to take on a different role in my life now.  It used to be that the content of this sheath was of utmost importance.  Now, more and more I simply spend time with this sheath, becoming aware of how it operates, letting it flow (in those rare lucid moments), watching it's amazing mosaic come alive and die from moment to moment.  It has become a practice for me to bring awareness to the way that my ego tries to inflate the movements of my mind into gargantuan, holy Truth's so that I can remember to breathe space into disagreements and soften my criticisms.  It's a work in progress, like everything.  But as I find myself softening my death grip on the stories and beliefs of this sheath I begin to settle into life's flow a bit more.  Maybe I don't know the ultimate Truth of Life, but I can experience it's ultimate Joy.   

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