teachings don’t negotiate

it’s going on in
your head
and you don’t know what’s
happening with you.
you think you’re
being realistic.
you can’t tell how far
off you got.

the more you 
think you’re being 
realistic 
the more adamant you get
that it’s so!

maybe you start off
being realistic,
and somewhere along the line
you get
swept up in how realistic 
you’re being.

you no longer have
a clue
what’s going on in
your head.

you keep making 
more and more miserable
situations
ahead of you like 
that.

you do it by thinking about
how do you make your present situation go on
and be something you can
count on.

That’s how you keep making
your future disappointments
out of your present one.

You take everything as a sign
that you’re making progress,
or else you’re regressing.

You don’t know what it is to be aware
and not think how am I doing?

You think you need to be aware of
something, 
so you can be aware of things that
other people aren’t.

Everybody does that.

The practice of being realistic is 
remember you’re doing that.

It comes out of 
remembering in sitting when you go off 
in your head.
Next thing you know,
you’re back.

All you know 
when you come back 
is you were off 
somewhere.

You don’t come back to 
knowing something that you can use 
to add to your collection of things 
that you know.

You don’t even know what you
came back to.

You come back to
what you’re supposed to be doing,
and you go on doing it.

You don’t come back to 
going around like somebody who remembers that they’re
meditating.

It doesn’t work in your regular life
if you’re not into the sitting enough.

Usually, you don’t like that part.
You’d like to negotiate with the teachings.
They should be flexible and meet you 
halfway.
That’s only being reasonable.

Too bad.

The teachings don’t go along with you
if you don’t go along with
them.