What I’m Thinking about When I’m Walking

I do a lot of meditating in motion nowadays. I thought it might be interesting to record my stream of consciousness on my daily walk. The results reminded me of a period when I was crashing at April and Chad’s pad in Berkeley and had just read one of Castaneda’s Don Juan books. I forget which one – I’ve read several of them more than once. But I seized on Don Juan’s statement that if a person would just write down their entire stream of consciousness for (a week? 10 days?) they would overcome the egoic mind and enter a permanent state of nonordinary consciousness. 

Or maybe it was Eckart Tolle’s idea. I forget. Anyway, I was at a real low point in my life – no money, no job, no career, no home, lost at sea in my own mind – so I decided to try it. After about two days, the ego coopted the project and I enthusiastically seized upon the idea of turning it into a great autobiographical novel about the quest for enlightenment…..

Anyhow, I’m happy to find that my baseline state of consciousness seems much more pleasant than it did fifteen years ago. But that damn egoic mind sure is a persistent little devil.

Listen: On My Walk Today (8:42)

The strange and strangely attractive trees at Mockingbird Corner #2.

The ‘wild garden’ across the street from the strange trees.

The birds in the grass turned out to be Brown-headed Cowbirds. First ones I’ve ever seen!

By Kurt Bauschardt from Edmonton, Canada (Brown-headed Cowbird) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)