There is a wonderful Indian story about a merchant who while pulling his cart to town sees a snake in the road ahead. He cannot go around it, he is horrified stricken with fear, paralyzed. He sits for hours, losing the day at the market because of the snake ahead. Finally as the light changes he realizes that it is just a piece of rope, that the snake never existed at all. It was just his perception causing this, fear, pain and suffering. So what is the cause of his suffering? Ignorance. He had a thought and believed that thought to be real, to be the thing that he conjured but it was wrong. Hopefully we reach a point in our quest where we realize that most of what we conjure in our minds about reality is wrong. How often do we ruminate over things and end up being wrong about them? We can waste hours of our lives worrying about work, home, a meeting, whatever and all those things we spent energy thinking about end up having no foundation. If we can begin to realize that most of the thoughts in our heads have no basis in reality we can get a glimpse of the problem. We can learn to ignore our opinions of things and try to see what is real in the moment. I have often said that our minds are like a yapping dog, they don’t stop and the yapping really doesn’t mean anything. We need to learn to ignore this noise, let it pass, give it no foothold so we can begin to see without the clutter. Begin to realize that your opinions about things have no basis in reality. They are conditioned by your life and experience and have no intrinsic meaning. This is just the beginning stage so don’t mistake it for something greater.
DEC
2017