The Field Marshal

I am a bad egg I did something really horrible today. Basically, I expected somebody to trust me, while I expressed my total distrust in that person. The worst part is that I told the person in her face that I didn't trust her. It must be hurtful for one person to tell another person that 'I don't trust you'. If I can say 'sorry' to her now, I would. But the context of this entire thing is just too bizarre that a 'sorry' would be bizarre. Being one of those who absolutely hates double-standards, I am guilty of being a hatable double-standard person today. I felt bad the moment that I let loose my tongue and allowed it to say what's on my mind. Yes, I have been known to speak without thinking. And yes, I agree with everyone that that's a stupid thing to do. For speaking without using my brains, wherever it went just now, I have hurt a person. No one deserves what I just did. I will not offer an excuse for what I did. Excuses are nothing but tiresome explanations which are designed by the perpetrator of a wrongful act to alleviate the sense of guilt for taking that action. What I intend to do is to reflect on what I did today and train myself not to do such things again. Refraining from such actions is a good start, but more importantly, I must come to an understanding that what I did is wrong. Call me a purist, but the act of suppresing a wrongful act while still thinking that there's nothing wrong is a cardinal sin for me. Being the non-reflective person that I am, I foresee a long night later as I try to decipher how to understand my mind, and hopefully rein it in and prevent it from hurting anyone in the future. I find it intriguing that I am trying the understand 'me'. Ain't 'me' the person that is typing this post now? But the fact is that 'I' being who I am doesn't understand the entire 'me'. Anyway, my mind is like a monkey that's running every doggone place. Time to catch and tame that monkey so that it will do some good and not go around causing havoc and hurting people. Let me end this post a Buddhist teaching I found: Ancient Pali texts liken meditation to the process of taming a wild elephant. The procedure in those days was to tie a newly captured animal to a post with a good strong rope. When you do this, the elephant is not happy. He screams and tramples, and pulls against the rope for days. Finally it sinks through his skull that he can't get away, and he settles down. At this point you begin to feed him and to handle him with some degree of safety. Eventually you can dispense with the rope and post altogether, and train your elephant for various tasks. Now you've got a tamed elephant that can be put to useful work. In this analogy the wild elephant is your wildly active mind, the rope is mindfulness, and the post is our object of meditation, our breathing. The tamed elephant who emerges from this process is a well-trained, concentrated mind that can then be used for the exceedingly tough job of piercing the layers of illusion that obscure reality. Meditation tames the mind. Henepola Gunaratna, Mindfulness in Plain English (Source: Best of "Buddhist quote of the moment")