tiger/cage

You are a tiger in a cage.

You do not have free will; you have randomosity within constraints. 

The tiger is your endocrine system; the cage is your neuronal structure. Every night your brain re-wires and curates this cage according to the data from the day, and every morning your tiger is let out to play.

As a baby your tiger is wild and plays at will; over time the tiger is admonished and encouraged, it learns from its mistakes, and the cage takes form.

As we grow, this layout becomes hardened, rigid. Walls are reinforced but they are rarely taken down. Your tiger loses the ability to roam at will. It becomes lethargic, weak. You think the problem is that your cage is the wrong shape and go about creating more walls, but the tiger becomes apathetic, angry, irate.

The tiger needs to grow; it needs to play.

For the tiger to rebuild its strength, you need to loosen your cage. You need to remove some of the programming you have in that neural network. You need to optimise the code so that the tiger can dance and hunt and play with yarn and be the tiger it was born to be.

This is why you are miserable. Your tiger is suffocated.

The moments when the tiger is playing are the moments when you are overcome with awe at the world around you; when your hair stands on end because of some sick bassline or you enter a flow state on your bike or in your studio. The tiger is the runners high and the divine spark which makes you jump out of bed and change the world.

But the tiger also has claws. And the tiger is prey for gamification, targeted advertising and AI-based dopamine hacking. The tiger will be led astray and a new cage will be placed around it; one that is not your own.

Go not long into the world, bhikkhus. The world is full of sense pleasures, and sense pleasures will give rise to craving and lust and suffering. Your tiger will become cranky, exhausted, and you will lose the ability to ride.

Because that’s the aim: to ride the tiger.

You need the tiger to be strong. You need an endocrine system which is alive and powerful and ripples with dopaminergic energy. But you need it to be under your own control, not that of others.

So how do you go about this?

The first part is to step back from the world. You have a cage which is largely not your own: you have been conditioned by responses from your mother, your father, your schoolhood and your work. You have been conditioned by likes and drugs and kisses and hugs. Some of these things may seem good and others may not, but until you stop reinforcing certain walls you cannot hope to destroy others.

This is what the buddha talked about when he mentioned kamma which removes kamma: action without intent. This is where meditation comes into play. But meditation is not just sitting and focusing on your breath; that idea is yet another cage and was only one of many ways the buddha both practiced and taught.

Meditation is play.

Meditation is getting on your bike and feeling your legs and letting the scenery wash over you and letting that tiger surge through your torso and arms as a ripple of ecstasy before you look up and soak in the beauty of the world.

Meditation is going for that run or picking up that guitar or sitting and swaying and humming and holding your baby and just rocking and loving your world and allowing the tiger to experience everything you are and were and ever will be. 

Meditation is being in the moment and letting your tiger roam, without restraint. Meditation is trusting that the tiger is good, and the tiger is pure, and the tiger is love, and the only reason the tiger was cranky in the first place is that the cage was too small.

Meditation is strengthening the tiger and seeing it for what it is.

The tiger is nibbana. The tiger is your reality. The tiger is everything that is divine.

Step back from the world and its expectations. Step back from your imagined responsibilities to your internalised formations of parent or religion. Step back from your externally-imposed inadequacy and the self-help about becoming a better and happier person. These are all just bars on the cage.

You choose whether to install these bars.

You choose to remove them.

It will take time. It will not be easy. You will come up against walls you never knew were there. It will hurt. Progress hurts. Growth is painful.

But you don’t need to do anything outside of just sitting and rocking with that baby (without the phone) or playing your guitar (without the score) or riding your bike (without the data devices) or spouting crap on the internet (without the like button).

All you need to do is let the tiger play. It is still there. It is alive. It is within all of us. It is the nature of the universe and all the wonder one can ever experience.

And one day you might just look up and realise that the tiger is happy. You feel it leaping and bounding in joy, claws retracted, waiting for you to hop on for a ride.

And then… then you are alive.

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