an ape walks into a bar and forgets about bananas and parties instead or: how i learned to stop worrying and start meditating

Today at Soulless Machine World (also known as Gold's Gym), I was reading Chögyam Trungpa's Smile at Fear: Awakening the True Heart of Bravery and had what I like to call an "I-think-this-can-genuinely-be-classified-as-a-sign" moment. It came when I read this particular passage:

"When you don't feel grounded or properly seated in your world, you cannot relate to your experience or to the rest of the world. So the problem begins in a very simple way. When body and mind are unsynchronized, you feel like a caricature of yourself, almost like a primordial idiot or clown. In that situation, it is very difficult to relate to the rest of the world.

That is a simplified version of what is known as the setting sun mentality: having completely lost track of the basic harmony of being human. The idea of the setting sun is that the sun is already setting in your world, and you cannot rise above the darkness. You feel that there is only misery, clouds, the dungeon, life in the gutter. To compensate for that, you might go to a very dark dungeon with bad lighting, where you get drunk. That is called a club. You dance like a drunken ape who has forgotten bananas and its home in the jungle a long time ago. So it feasts on cheap beer while wiggling its tail. There is nothing wrong with dancing per se, but in this case it is a form of escaping from or avoiding your fear. It's very sad. That is the setting sun. It's a dead end, a very dead end."