It was late and I was heating water. I said to the friend who was over, “Do you have a tea thought?” She came to look at her choice of flavors and laughed. “I always have a tea thought,” she said.
I was confused. “You mean you’re always in the mood for tea?”
“You know, a tea thought, an I thought.”
I should not have had that second beer at the bar. “An I thought?”
“In Buddhism,” she explained. “The I thought is the false concept of an ‘I,’ of a self separate from other selves. So when you said a tea thought…”
“Ah, and the J thought, and the K thought.” We laughed, though I wasn’t exactly sure what joke I was trying to make. But clearly I was trying, and she’s easy-going.
As she chose her tea (Snow Leopard), I mentally kicked myself for not knowing about the ‘I’ thought. I mean, I read that one Thich Naht Han book, most of it. And I meditate, or at least I did last year, though come to think of it there was an ‘I’ in my mantra. Damnit.
But as I drank my tea (Well Rested), I let myself off the hook, because if the self is simply a mental construct, which did sound more familiar the more I thought about it, there was no I to be more or less enlightened than the person next to me.
You’re so vain, you probably think this post is about you.
Have had that song in my head since the second I saw your title….
My job is done.