What is my/your effect on you/me

Taisuke gave me this talk on tape, Getting Unstuck, that I just started listening to last night, and which has reminded me of the importance of meditation. I'm looking forward to listening to more of it.<

For some reason, it got me thinking about cause and effect a lot. Not that it has much to do with cause and effect directly, but meditating makes things like cause and effect very clear for me. I was practicing meditation on the bus ride to work today, marginally successfully, and ended up during one of my lapses thinking about religion and its relationship to strife. I realized I'd been blaming the dark ages on Christianity, when perhaps religion became so popular because it was the only thing not painful at the time, clung to in desperation. Then I found myself thinking that perhaps our current middle east troubles are not the effect of religion, but that in fact the current world powers are pushing us towards conflict in order to make people more religious. Conflict to spur people onto dark age levels of religion. Make the mainstream more in line with them. I'm not saying I believe this, but it's weird to have a cause and effect moment of liberation, because it suddenly spreads to everything.

Like dying. Maybe people do not suddenly become wise when they approach death. Maybe the reason they are more readily accessing their wisdom is they have more time for stillness. They're kind of forced into meditation because they can't really move or do anything. Maybe simulating this kind of situation, an enforced entrapment, would be beneficial to many of us frantic thinkers.

Anyway, it's good to have a day when I remember my mind is still full of epiphanies and interesting things, if only I pay attention to being and noticing things. Epiphanies: not just for kids!

I had a pretty bad migraine on Sunday. It was my own fault. I poisoned myself with absinthe. I like to think the migraines are because my body is a neat freak, aggressively cleaning itself out via both exits at the slightest mess. Rather than brain damage, which is what I was convinced was happening for a while there.