Ah, congratulations! You’ve finally won the ultimate cosmic lottery: the human birth. According to the ancient manuals, this beats being a brilliantly aimless amoeba because you alone possess the 'discriminative faculty'. That’s just a fancy way of saying you can stand in the cereal aisle for twenty minutes agonizing over organic oats versus sugar bombs, utterly paralyzed by the tyranny of karma.

And if you manage to escape the cereal aisle, you’ll stumble right into the trap of the ego - which, according to Shri Ramana Maharshi, is just your 'adjunct conflated awareness'. Yes, that’s right, you’re basically a sentient pile of sticky-notes fused together with bad decisions, desperately trying to convince yourself you're pure awareness while scrolling your phone at 3 AM.

As Mark Epstein helpfully points out in Advice Not Given, meditation isn't supposed to be a cozy little panic-room where you hide from your responsibilities. No, it’s actually a delightful, moment-to-moment reminder that everything you love is falling apart and you, too, are rapidly decomposing. Namaste!

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