If i think i am praying then i am not praying

So says the coptic monastic in a BBC radio documentary. Exactly! this is one of the most fundamental truths. Jesus says if i go to the altar to be seen at the altar then that is my reward. If you go silently to pray to God then your reward is boundless and in Heaven. So says exactly the Buddha: if you think you are helping then you are still bound to the illusion of self and other.

And this is exactly the point of self-reference... that if we think we are reflecting upon ourself then we are not.... why because it is ourself that is doing the reflecting! We are always outside the frame because we are the camera and a camera cannot take a picture of itself. This does not mean that a camera does not exist, but to itself if is nothing... (and what is not to itself is irrelevant anyway).

Now take Descartes. I think therefore I am, should actually be "I think I am thinking therefore I am not".

Kierkegaard (apparently; after Wayne's World), ' If I name thee, I negate thee'. That which comes under scrutiny so that we think we know it, actually we are doing the opposite and knowing it's illusion and it's mask.

A moment of contemplation, a moment of prayer, a moment of goodness, a moment of self all occur without us calling them that... indeed without us thinking "about" it. To think about it we must stand apart from it and have a look. As i realised on Ben Macdui mountain: ironically the more effort I put into climbing the mountain the less of the mountain I could see and the more of its neighbours. We always see what we are not, what is past, or out of reach. What we are, what truely exists, is known because it is the air that we breath, the light that enters our eyes, the ground upon which we walk... things we never think about when they are real. But here I refer to unreal things, ideas, words, images, thoughts; things we can't breath, or see or stand upon, things which we only see on the horizon from the unknown mountain upon which we stand as we read this.

But don't search for this mountain: the dog chasing it's tail, the camera dreaming of what it looks like, Pooh searching for the creature that made the tracks: truth is Being not knowing. Accepting that reality is already here; we don't move.

Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly
Today I am a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

What is the use of imaging what we are! A butterfly or a man; it makes no difference. We are. Stop.

But!, we protest, I must know what things I need to do tomorrow, what items to buy, who I must meet, the doctors appointment, the appointment at the bank, the pension and holiday plans...

And Sherlock Holmes will solve the murder, but that isn't reality!

Yes we do swim in the vast ocean of unrealities that we call "life", and to get out would be like Sherlock Holmes just walking off the stage... and he might fall in the process and hurt himself... but then was that in the play or not?

Let the play continue, and let the audience from the safety of their seats watch the illusion. But each and ever person there is abandoning the reality for the spectacle of the play, for reality is no spectacle, it doesn't unfold on any stage; we know reality when we suddenly find the stage around us, the spotlight upon us and a script forced into our hand: that is reality. And, we may as easily be alone when it happens, and it matters not what the script says, because Reality is always there and so never changes.