Buddhist Meditation: Feedom from the Fetters of Language, and the Defilements of Money…
Money is the square root of all evil; kindness is the reward for all kindness. And this is more than just idle word-play, and linguistic sleight-of-hand, because it goes straight to the heart of the nature of our system of rewards and punishments, whether there truly is something like ‘currency’ that can mediate between the world and our bottomless pit of desires or whether that is something dark and unknown that is forever fated to lurk hidden and unseen, only to rise and strike with the suddenness of synchronous sensation, as if the fate of all time and space lay in the simultaneous conjunction of desire and object, self and the world, subject predicating objects with apparent prepositioning and with only scant adverbial regard for the adjectival implications. So money is a poor substitute for language as the medium of our interplay with nature, and language itself is flawed enough to begin with. But such is the world that we live in, our humanness now defined by language, and our lives now defiled by money. Ironically there seems to be a path forward with money, with the advent of technology, such that instead of physically dealing with money itself, we can simply click ‘Pay Now’ on the digital screen and numbers change locations in a way that either harms us or hurts us, while physical objects may also change locations in a roughly parallel way, unless we’re talking about books, in which case I’ll just read them all right here, thank you, at least fifty in the last two years from the beginnings of written time to the latest screed from self-described scribes, and I’ve not touched paper even once. But I hope that Buddhist monks have not succumbed to the temptation to click ‘Buy Now’, while at the same time they are forbidden to touch physical cash, thus subverting the intent, if not the letter of the dharma. Call me old-fashioned, but the problem goes deeper than all that, in that we feel the necessity to mediate ourselves (non-selves) through symbols and time-stamps, when life is still arguably at its best when not mediated at all. And that means getting rid of language, too, at last for a while, at least a little bit, hopefully every day, if not every hour, on the hour. And that means meditation, at its finest, proto-consciousness, unmediated by language, or God forbid money, when all that is needed is conscious awareness and lack of desire for anything else, for as long as that moment can last. For the best moments are not moments at all, but conscious continuums of unfettered awareness. And that is the challenge in this world of unrighteous debate, we standing our ground, until death do us part, older and hopefully wiser. There’s too much talk, not enough inaction…
I’m paraphrasing, of course, but this is the question that has plagued—no, let’s say intrigued’—the sangha (Buddhist community) for two and a half millennia, more or less, if not in so many words, then in so many actions, cutting to the chase, and allowing for interpolations and extrapolations, i.e. whether to think big, farming ideas and allowing for fierce and free debate, or to think small, on the achievement of individual ‘liberation’ and the purging of ‘defilements’ from the composite makeshift personalities that we call ‘I’…
streaming consciousness... 
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