Shhhh….

Another day, another city burns, a bomb detonates, another someone goes berserk stabbing and shooting others, and everywhere the mass of humanity wrings its hands and stews and frets and points fingers and prays.

Pity the tiny, oh-so-limited human mind and the endless conclusions it draws about the world around it. I know, I think, I believe, I suspect, I feel, I’m convinced….

The only thing we know for certain is that we don’t know anything.

Beginning with the me that thinks it knows all these things.

But boy that doesn’t stop us from spouting off about just about everything, does it? The mind chatters away and ‘I’ bite on so many of those thoughts, stories, images, words, sights, sounds, and smells.

He said that? She did what? Those bastards! My god commands me to….

Give it a rest. Seriously. Or in the modern vernacular, STFU.

Most of us are so caught up in mental agitation it never occurs that we’re caught up in mental agitation. That we ARE the mental agitation.

Imagine, just for a moment, no thoughts. None, a completely blank slate within. Who or what are you?

That’s the funny thing about the human animal – ‘it’ (in the form of a ‘person’) doesn’t really exist without thought. In the absence of thought (a rarity), something is still there, but not John or Suzuki or Muhammad or T’neisha.

Similarly, picture, for a moment, a planet where only you exist. Go post-apocalyptic, whatever is needed, but just picture a planet where you are its lone human inhabitant. Now, do ‘you’ still exist? Specifically, as a human being, or a particular gender, or as an American, and so on.

Don’t just read these passages, really stop and contemplate them. Close your eyes, turn off the background noise, and picture you without thought or a world filled with humans. The resulting realization may just open your eyes to a different world entirely.

What, in fact, are ‘you’ in the absence of thought and other humans and their thoughts and labels and concepts?

Thoughts flare into and out of awareness all day long (and at night in the form of dreams) and like a hitchhiker, the ego, the I, rides along with the more familiar ones and mistakes itself for them – as in, this is WHO I am or this is WHAT I believe.

I gaze down at the fingers tapping out these words on the keyboard, at the hair growing on the arms, at the bulges of veins carrying an endless supply of blood and oxygen and nutrients here and there in the body, and I have nothing to do with any of it. Yet when I rise comes the announcement, “My back hurts” or “I’m hungry.”

So subtle a fiction. Yet so obvious. So persistent.

In mystical teachings this is known as the ‘open secret.’ You don’t need scripture or a guru to teach you – look for yourself. Go find that magical me that is lining up all those thoughts, that is growing the hair on your arms, that supposedly is running the show.

Then see if you can ever take serious anything that comes out of your mouth – or mind – again. (Of course you will – this takes practice, a conscious commitment.)

All of humankind’s troubles can be narrowed down to these billions of cases of mistaken identity and the fear that necessarily accompanies them: a frightened, vulnerable, ultimately doomed little me separate, apart, alone.

Yet all of these words, to that same ‘discerning’ mind, likely will be dismissed as ‘Doug’s bullshit’ or ‘woo-woo’ or ‘nice but unrealistic.’ And those minds will remain trapped in ignorance and hands will wring and nerves will be frayed at “what is becoming of this world.”

Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know. – The Great Way