Maya, Illusion, and the Ruminations of the Buddha’s Barber…
Life has no meaning but that which we give it. We are the significance monkeys. We are the meaning monkeys. We are the monkeys hooked on happy endings and the agreement of subject and object. We are monkeys in love with our languages and out literature and our lust for languor, long slow baths and a reason to laugh, castles in the air and castles made of sand, visions of Johanna in the palms of our hands. We spin a lump of sugar into cotton-candy daydreams, and live out our lives in opposition to the obvious, that we are lumps of stuff pressed into the service of human hubris. We create concepts and precepts and conclusions with antecedents. But just because you can imagine something doesn’t mean that it’s real. And that’s one of life’s lessons, the difference between reality and fantasy, a sliding scale of solidity…
Control, unwavering control, of yourself, or even better: non-self, if you can manage it, easy enough but for the vicissitudes of will, that one part of the (s)kandhas that escapes easy categorization and refuses to fall blindly into place as but one of the ‘heaps’ that comprise our personalities and personas and persons that we oftentimes think of as ‘self’, or ‘selves’ if you’re bi-polar, or even ‘soul’ if you have long-term plans, or God forbid ‘ego’ if you can think of little else…
Theravada Buddhism has it easy, when it comes to dhamma (dharma) talks, just pull out the old mind-kilesa-breath-nose-navel-‘Buddho Buddho Buddho’ playbook, rinse and repeat, hard to screw up unless you want to get into the murky afterbirth of past lives and kamma (karma), doing Yogic headstands and plotting Ptolemaic cosmic epicycles, trying to explain how anatta (non-self) somehow gets reborn, when there really is nothing there to begin with. But still they do. It’s embarrassing, especially when some of the same ones…
streaming consciousness... 
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