I was watching an episode of Showtime’s Shameless, when one of the ancillary characters, herself a sexually obsessed, culinary expert and agoraphobic (God’s sense of humor I am certain) was baking cupcakes until every space in her kitchen and living room was filled with muffin tins. As the middle aged misfit, played by Joan Cusak, stood bemused holding a hot tray of steamy sweet bread and no where to put it down, she calls out to her alchoholic sex guest on the couch and says “Frank, what should I do?” and Frank answers “Stop?”

What seems so clear of course is untennable to the egoic mind when caught up in the drama of a bio-chemical moment. STOP? Well of course I should just Stop, but that’s not going to happen. Not right now. In this moment I have to figure it out, put on the brakes, change the circumstances, alter the outcome, create a new possibility or otherwise fake it until I make it. Only AFTER that can I consider the possibility of STOPPING.

There is a flow to suffering that seems like a perpetual motion machine. Our mind makes up stories to fuel the fire and we see flashes of images in our vivid imagination that reinforce the validity of our unquestioned assumptions. And its not only what we can identify as “suffering” per se, it is with all addictive behaviors that take us away from JUST THIS. Our Facebook tickertake-checking, the War of the World scenarios (be they ‘real’ or ‘role played’), our obsession with finding just the right word, look or taste of the day. Whatever it is that is taking us away from STOPPING the insessent noise and just BEING for a moment with the Truth of our existence.

STOP — Silent Touching One’s Presence

When we put it that way, it is both easy to see why we avoid it as well as the utter importance to continue to do so. Our egoic mind spends so much energy maintaining the story of its exclusivity. It would have us believe we are forever sentient and separate from all that we see and beyond the naked eye. But when we STOP and allow the din of our drama die down, what we are left with is an emptyness that feels so fullfilling, so much more real than any conversation we were having with our conceptual self that at Once we See why it is that we seek the Silence.

Despite Bob Newhart’s plea to just “STOP IT – or I’ll bury you alive in a box”  … there is a deeper understanding perhaps forged in cosmic humor that the ME we believe that we are, who continues to bake muffins, is incapable of stopping … but that which is our True Nature has never forgotten the punch line.