I have noticed that what I've been posting for the past year plus has been a lot of long-winded, boring, highly-detailed, navel-gazing, rambling minutiae. Nothing clever, funny nor particularly interesting, I shouldn't wonder, which is what someone would want to be in a public forum such as the internet.

But as I've said before, this isn't about readership. This blog is just my expression. There's no theme here; I just post about what sparks the neurons, whether it be movies, music, reads, Buddhism, suicide, spirituality, death, religion, mental health or whatever issue I want to spout on about (and believe me I'm leaving out a lot).

It occurs to me that this long-windedness has a lot to do with the isolation I've found myself in. I'm no hermit. I don't think there's any such thing as a "hermit with internet". But isolated I am. Recluse may be a better description of what I'm doing. A hermit is cut off, and that can't happen with internet. A recluse is withdrawn, and that I am.

If social interaction is a release outlet, then I don't have it, and the constant mind-stream of my thoughts is going on and on without outlet, and then when I decide to type something down, it just all trickles out in highly-detailed, rambling minutiae.

But this isolation also emphasizes the mind-stream of thoughts; that it's there. And that in Buddhist practice, that's an aspect that needs to be tackled with the idea of cutting it off. It relates to our ego-selves.

This mind-stream of thoughts is our ego-selves or, if not, is representative of it. And it's that attachment to our ego-selves that keeps us in cyclic samsaric existence, so theory goes.

I remember in early practice coming up with visualizations to break the mind-stream, or at least be mindful of it. Back then it was simply about stopping the mental chatter. Recognize it, and try to return to some mental quiet. Beyond that, I didn't know. But now, years and years later, there's much more urgency to tackling and cutting off the mind-stream once there's a realization of how it's connected to the ego-self.

I would go so far to say that it's a key step towards enlightenment. It's a breaking, smashing of the notion of subjectively conceived reality. And the hardest part of it is that we have this mental structure that perceives reality, and now it's a matter of using that mental structure to disassemble that same mental structure. Maybe that's why enlightenment is so friggin' hard.