Where are you placing your attention, in the present or in the past?
For most of us this question is difficult to answer due to the fact that we are unconscious and unaware of where our attention is at any given moment.
Our attention has been ambushed and whilst we are sensory beings, engaged with a perpetual present moment through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, most of us are triggered into thought almost constantly.
Your default state is sensory presence. Thought is simply a tool designed to help you consider the ideas you hold, in fact it's just your ideas speaking inside your mind.
We think because we apply importance to an idea and the mind dilligently and elegantly triggers us into consideration of the ideas we have made important.
The ambush mentioned above is on a fundamental level however. It relates to the fact that most of the human species is now chasing their peace and happiness in external ideas they create of people, places and things. We are on an endless search for something that will bring us the fulfillment we crave, and what could be more important than the search for happiness or retain what little you have. It means that these ideas become all consuming.
Most have created a huge number of these ideas and unsurprisingly made ALL of them into super important things to chase or avoid.
It means your trigger system is overpowered by the things you need to be, do or have in order to be happy and it is now working against you.
What does that mean? It is dilligently taking you out of the present moment and your senses and into a storm of thoughts whenever it can in the hope that your thoughts will finally find the one thing that will give you the happiness you crave.
Why? Because you have so many important things that need consideration in order to be happy and you are navigating a sea of externalities. It's essentially the thoughts that are trying to control your outer world so that your inner world will feel better or at least stay OK. It means that everything on the outside has become a critical thing to manage or we lose how we feel.
We have become very distracted humans, lost in our thoughts almost anywhere and everywhere in the hope that we can find some peace and happiness somewhere within all the thinking.
What's interesting is, it's all of the thinking that is now taking our peace and happiness in some sort of cruel paradox. Consider this. If you weren't constantly thinking about managing your world, how would you feel? If there was nowhere to go, nothing to be and nothing to have and you were simply enjoying where you are without a need to chase something else or avoid something that may take it all away, how would that feel?
So what is the answer? A fundamental shift in your perception of where you will find happiness and what is actually a good way to get it. A reboot! Because this method or ambush will never get the result you want. As we realise that happiness is a state of being, not a destination delivered by people, places or things on the outside we can dissolve the huge number of things that we are chasing and the things that we are avoiding just to feel OK.
It turns out that what we are chasing or avoiding in the endless thinking are only the ideas we ourselves created of what would bring the peace and happiness we crave so much. The people places and things are simply idea based metephors of where we hope our happiness will be or of what will keep us feeling OK. As they are our own ideas they can be dissolved easily to give us the freedom to live in our senses, not thoughts.
Zen Jungle is a shift from chaos to peace and joy through transformation.
