There is a monkey between your ears. It is forever curious, hungry and thirsty, as well as sexually aroused. And here is the remedy: starve the monkey to death.

Addendum I (December 15, 2012)

Along these lines, I just found something wonderful in James Austin’s Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness.[1] He quotes a poem by the Rinzai master Bunan Shido (1602-1676): “Die while alive. / Thoroughly die. / Then just do as you will, / And all is right.”[2] Exactly. By the way, I did not even notice this poem about enlightenment on my first reading earlier this year. To wit, I must be coming along. The old monkey between my ears must be pretty close to starving already.

Addendum II (August 10, 2017)

I was delighted to come across this haiku and the first addendum on one of my uncharted journeys through my writings. And then I looked for the two in my book about yoga, which is available in Portable Document Format on my Ca’ Bon Gallery website (www.cabongallery.org). Having failed to find it, I decided to add it to the book without much ado. But then I changed my mind. Like all my books, it contains nothing but selections from my Residua. Carefully picked though they are, these selections cannot possibly contain everything I have written on a particular subject. A careful reader ought to search through my magnum opus entire for all the missing gems. And many of them are perforce missing given the gargantuan size of my writing project. As for the careless readers, they are the least of my concern, anyway. Peekaboo!

Footnotes

1. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2009.

2. Op. cit., p. 203.