Heaven can wait...

 Listening to Vengelis, "The Chariots of Fire" at 2;45 am having just returned from my 'port' , where i hang out with a few guys who slightly younger than I am. I have  hung out there for the past ten years or so. It is my role as a Malay and staying in touch with realities of this dimension of my life, being  raised most of my life among Malays. I cannot recall when my mind stopped thinking in Malay, perhaps along my primary school years when I started reading all I could lay my hands on but only in English. The day my eldest brother returned from England after his studies he brought two children story books for his twin kid brothers. One was Robin Hood and the other was, 'Grimms Fairy Tales' as I had the first choice, I picked the latter. I was  one of the highest English scorer in my entire school for my level. I say this not to brag only because it is pertinent to knowing yet another piece of me. A piece of the puzzle that is crucial to my identity as a whole. 

The past will always visit you at any given moment, triggered by
 the slightest hint of a related subject, image or mental formations and phenomena that we encounter daily or moment to moment. It is in how we digest and come to a right understanding of their significance or lack of, that matters as this can help to lay these memories and past experiences to come to a permanent rest and visit us no more. Thoughts will rise and fall, it is for the disciple to be aware of their movement without getting lost in them; this is meditation. Watching thoughts rise and fall with bare attention will bring the rise and fall  of thoughts to a slow diminishing state and results in the eventual removal of them. You can never remove thoughts or any form of mental formations by suppression or denial, or simply ignoring them, they will keep on recurring. By meditative observation method and conscious awareness of their movements, the cause and the length of time and what removes it from the mind is the standard Buddhist way of dealing with thoughts. The Japanese Zen school of meditation practice cuts to the chase in this matter by  strictly focussing on the breath alone while in deep meditation. 

To have a good understanding of the workings of the mind and thoughts in particular, I listen to Jedu Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, Mooji Baba, I read Jung and several others. Knowledge are wings by which we fly to heaven, someone once told me and it got stuck on me to seek knowledge high and low, not because i am aiming to go to heaven, but because, it made sense. As is said, heaven can wait, I am still trying to understand I am here in the first place.