Beginner's mind
Zen mind
Forget all. Be a beginner.
Much of the personal turmoil that surrounds me can easily be traced to thousands of experiences in my life. Add to that an excellent memory, and the sensation of being inside a hurricane of emotions and behaviors becomes a very concrete entity.
Enter the monkeys with the beginner's mind:
I remember receiving that book from a very good friend uncountable years ago, when he saw that I thought too much, and thus tried to pry me away from that excessive analytical bent of mine.
Later on, and before coming to this country, a taxi driver that had been trained by the Israeli Army told me "there is no thinking, just acting."
How true.
Thinking is only a rationalization of decisions already taken, at best, and a morass in which all actions die, at worst. Our mind's abstract processes, while amazing=g in creating its own reality and interpreting it, also serve as a very convenient barrier between the world that lives out there and the one that gets interpreted in the mind.
Too much thought gets you a Frankenstein's monster.
We live startled, aroused, expecting the universe to behave in one way or another. And, by and large, the universe complies. We attempt to sit in zazen but really, the first act is that of lacking reference, world, distinctions and categories. We do fully live when being silent and completely new: a beginner's mind in which every act is light and sensation, and we do not know.
We, I hide behind a wall of knowledge, forms, thoughts, and expectations. I become what others expect, what others determine, and silently scream my own self, trying desperately to untangle.
That is, until I let go, and forget those expectations, and relentlessly approach that moment with a complete awareness and an empty mind.