Hello all,

I find myself frightfully irritated on the close of the first day of Ango with the accretions of my intellectual understandings from over the years, like a pool full of stromatolites.

I understand full well intellectually and can write nicely worded paeans to truth being nothing other than just this moment. But I cannot seem to drop my addiction to looking for something else. Waiting for that magic moment when things click into place.

Further, I find that instead of looking at or being just the experience of this moment, I am looking at my ideas about being just this moment. I would drop them, but they seem stuck to the sides of my brain with Super Glue.

I have so many beautiful and refined ideas. My brain never stops coming up with them. For the "brain brakes" to start working and my mind to start to slow down takes much of a whole sitting period, if not a whole period or even more than one. I tend to spend the first fifteen minutes of any sit with hardly any moments of mindful awareness as my brain is moving at 100 miles an hour and dense with thought, like some kind of wacky centrifuge. But even once it slows... then I start looking for "it"... this kensho experience I can't deny wanting to have. Which I know is foolish, but like the rest of my ideas... hard to get rid of.

I do not wish to stop thinking or having ideas, I quite enjoy thinking and pondering while off the cushion, I just wish the products of such didn't make it so hard to experience anything other than through a thick film of ideas.

Help? :lol:

Stephanie