A Fool That Seest a Game Play'd Home, the Rich Stake Drawn, And Takest it All for Jest.

There is often a compelling urge to right perceived wrongs, find the correct path in life, or change what is and our reactions to it. Meaning, meaning, meaning: there is the endless search for it. The urge to do the right thing, find the right belief system, the right form of meditation, the correct way of being and doing and thinking and feeling...yet all of this is fraught with intrinsic meaning.

I cannot vouch for the absolute. I cannot describe what is before and beyond all description by definitive default. Nor can anyone; "pointers", we are told, are all that can be managed. It is perhaps a trick of the ego, to claim for itself everlasting eternal existence whilst denying its own reality. It is perhaps a quirk of the identity to endeavour, through years of diligent practice in a recognised form of Buddhism or Vedanta, to strip away the very thing that practices. I can only say that the practice is the goal; the journey is the destination; and the seeking is the realisation.

Try as we might to describe the quality of existence, the nameless being-ness, simple and unadorned, that is the underlying common denominator of all that is and seems to be, we stumble over the words that are never the thing itself. Yet those words and concepts are life too. Scholarly appreciation and tenacious study of the nature of consciousness are laudable; dedicated practice in the meditative states that clear away, if only for a short time, the running commentary on existence is to be admired. But life need not be, nor is it likely to be, understood to be lived. To be here, now is not an elusive state that the mind must be conditioned to. To be here, now is all there ever is. If meaning is taken from the turn of events or the events themselves, either possibility is exactly as is must be.

Several clips today, each of them a brief scene of fun or poignancy. Enjoy.