On a Thai Beach

I was sitting with an old traveler and his wife on Lamai beach. The old man said, "You spaced out a little there, didn't you? Think about this. You were just somewhere else in your mind. You were here and there. What if you could just be there and not just here all the time? Do you kow how much effort you put out being here? If you drift away you bring yourself back. Lose your place in a book for a minute and then you come back. But look at those gulls. You can imagine what it must be like to be one of them and when I do that I feel like I almost could completely imagine being them, but I can't. Because I'm me. And if I could become one of them I wouldn't remember it. The I that is me wouldn't remember it. And as a gull would I know that I was a person being the gull? No. I would just be the gull. What keeps us from shifting our awareness completely is us, who we know we are, what we've been taught we are. Some people can do it. I believe the buddha could do it. He had an oceanic experience as a child and spent his whole life in training to recapture and maintain that moment. But for the rest of us I don't think we can any more tap that ability that the buddha developed than we can become the gull, unless we can put our normal selves aside, the ones that are sitting here now, whatever that means."