by Michael Darling
A boy was ready to become a man. He had seen how men acted, how men talked, and how they treated themselves and the world; he wanted to know how it felt to grow up. He began by paying attention to his thoughts and how they kept him seeing and acting towards the world in a certain way.
For his whole life, everything had been dissatisfying to him, and he kept looking for something better than the last thing to bring him happiness. But nothing was ever good enough, and, like Mick Jagger, he couldn’t get no satisfaction. He had the strong belief that, if the world and everything in it would just be better, he could finally be happy and have a good time.
He moved from city to city looking for the coolest people, the best music, and the most fun things to do, but satisfaction still eluded him. He was in the coolest part of the coolest city on earth, and it was a major drag. The more he paid attention to his mind, the more he realized that the world wasn’t dissatisfying; he was dissatisfied. He had been dissatisfied since he was a little boy, and he began to see that all of his dissatisfaction was a creation manifested by judging the world.
For a long time, a voice in his mind had told him that nothing was ever good enough. As he began to stalk this voice, paying attention to the words and images it used and the feelings and emotions that he created in his body by listening to the voice, this was the source of his the restlessness and anger that had been present throughout his life.
Through stalking he started to realize that the world was perfect just the way it was. He began to learn the feelings of gratitude and love, feelings that had only been artificial concepts in his jaded mind.
The more he stalked the part of himself that created his dissatisfaction, the more satisfied he became, until he was able to be at peace with the world and drink up the feelings of gratitude for being alive and the love of every second of existence he was blessed with.
Dancing Bear Teaching Lodge 