not thinking

While stretching after a breif ride on the trainer and a dissapointing intro to the spanish-dubbed movie 'Dragonheart'with Dennis Quaid, I focused on the small logo of my MCT shorts. 'VO2 MAX: clothing for your favorite part of the day' is what is written on the inner tag. Thinking of how much time has passed since I had last been at my VO2 max, I realized yet another reason I love my bike so much- riding as hard as I can frees me from my thoughts. As is the first step of meditation, I stop thinking. There's still a mess of funny business in its place- a bunch of pain signals janking around and so forth- but I won't be tormented by the sort of contradictory logical thought processes which plaugue the mind during reviews of Kant's ideas in philosophy class. That is to say, I stop thinking about thinking about myself. That's the key idea. You know human beings are so arrogantly proud of their claimed superiority over the animal kingdom, naming their sacred capacity as that of self-consciousness and logical thought (which by the way is not so exclusive a trait as we might like to think, i.e. Koko the gorilla). Has not self-consciousness only served to seperate us from the whole, creating 'subject' and 'object', founding that spiritually limiting concept of ego, and above all forming the demented web of modern truths all linked by the mighty 'reason' of man? Have not the ghosts of Plato and Socrates haunted the minds of men for centuries, propogating dualistic myths of right and wrong, true and false, or good and bad? My feline brother Stanley Jones has none of these sour thoughts to spoil the his nap at noon, the hunt at dusk, or an encounter with invading racoons. Stanley Jones is the embodiment of the tao. He is the ultimate sage. He is our teacher.

So why, you may ask, am I sitting here indoors with my heartrate at a pathetically low rhythm THINKING about me thinking about me thinking? Because my damn knee won't allow me to go out and suffer on the hills.