Everyone is born with a nervous system,
everyone’s nervous system  is born with a certain temperament;
everyone’s nervous system has a brain at one end,
and everyone’s brain culminates in a cortex which has thoughts;
everyone’s thoughts originate in their nervous system (which has a temperament) --  thus are the thoughts which appear in their cortex’s mind
filtered through their temperament.

Everyone’s mind is like a dog in the yard of their consciousness,
its interests reflective of their nervous system’s temperament,
(of no importance: a Chihuahua is interested in things chihuahuaian:
a Doberman in matters dobermanian, but a dog is a dog is a dog);
the dog is always active, either chasing passing cars
(the canine activities of other men: books, movies, music, their comments)
or its own memories.

No one can change what they are born as;
no one can change their inherent temperament;
men claim to believe they can change their thinking (the way their mind works):
an idea that proves useful  --  but overlooks a certain fact.
All men want to control their thinking (control the dog’s activity);
some men want the ability to stop its movements entirely  --
even banish them from their mind;
the mind is a car with no driver  --  how are they ever going to exercise such powers?

Long ago someone with a decidedly non standard temperament
to their nervous system discovered that if you simply turned and looked at the dog,
it would immediately sit and just pant;
no one can control their mind (their thoughts can say that they do),
and no one can stop the brain from the electrochemical activity
that produces the attention men call consciousness in the thing they call the mind;
this attention goes where the dog goes (regardless of what the dog may say).
A man’s mental attention is forever trailing after something;
the dog always looking for a car to chase, and if momentarily finding none that
suits its interests, it chases memories of previous chases.

Men with slight interest in this matter have thoughts which say that
the particular cars their attention is attracted to are themselves of significance;
that perhaps the unruly nature of their dog is due to it being attracted to unsavory cars (mind to ideas), and they undertake to retrain theirs (as though it was ever trained)  --  bring it under their control by redirecting its interests
(a man can do this same as make his nose hear).
A man with a deep interest in this affair eventually realizes through experience
that the dog of his mental attention will never be permanently stilled,
nor the nature of its activity changed or controlled;
he ultimately comes to the obvious recognition that it is the dog in his mind
that is saying that the dog should be controlled, or even banished.
The natural functions in animals (including man) are not suicidal,
(if any were, why would they be present to begin with);
you will never change the nature of the/your dog;
“you” (clearly in quotation marks) will never bring the dog under “your” control
(tell us what you are going to think next?  --  and the thoughts after that one will be?),
and you will never remove him from your yard and life,
(unless “you” consider suicide an acceptable price to prove this wrong), but what
you (if you are part of that long-ago, supra mentioned man’s anomalistic lineage)
can do (having two eyes, both physically and mentally) is turn one eye on the dog,
which unfailingly will make him instantly sit and do nothing but pant
for as long as you watch him,
and with your remaining eye, engage in the activities that the normally
uncontrollable dog would otherwise be doing.
You can turn your attention (or at least, half) to the passing cars that
make up and populate man’s second, recreational reality
without being totally immersed in them, as would be the dog:
when he chases cars on his own (i.e. both of your inner eyes are drawn into his activity) he disappears into the car:
you (the intangible “you” of your consciousness) becomes nothing other than
the movie you are watching, book you are reading, song you are hearing,
or ideas issuing from another man’s dog’s mouth.
This is what makes ordinary men proclaim a movie, book, or song “great!”  --
it gave their ever agitated dog/mental-attention something to focus on
that its temperament found entertaining.

An activity in man’s second, cultural reality (religious, political, artistic, intellectual)
is deemed a success if large numbers of dogs chase it and their attention
(for an appropriate period of time) is so affixed thereto that the dog and their attention (their self-of-consciousness) in essence, ceases to exist as an entity separate from
the activity on which they are focused;
this is what ordinary minds call: being entertained  --
this is what gives a few people: a certain pain.
Their annoyance is not caused by the nature of particular cars passing through collective humanity’s other reality (movies, songs, religious beliefs, political ideas),
and their complaint is not really with the nature of their dog who is attracted to such (the nature of a dog is canine: case closed);
their dissatisfaction comes from a more intense than normal desire to
bring the activity that goes on in their mind under their control,
which at root is the desire to change what you are: change your temperament;
the coloring filter through which your mental activity flows before reaching consciousness and the mind: the impossible dream:
in that the mind is a driverless car  --  how are you to ever take control of it?  --
the dog rides in the car it believes it is chasing  --
all of a man’s inner attention,
the entirety of his sense of an individual self is in the car  --
indistinguishable from the car, the movie, the thought;

A man who suffered from a string of lingering ills on some days would upbeat say: “I’ve felt worse  --  same as how mentally, there have been times when
I was more asleep and distracted than I am at this moment,”
(an observation that did not seem to add to his feeling of well being).
 
 

The reason the certain man offers no solutions to humanity's
spiritual, moral, and intellectual problems
is that  --   there are none (problems, that is).
 
 

Each day one man made every effort not to go to sleep,
fearing that this time he might never awaken therefrom, but might die  --
“Don’t laugh,” he says, “It would be a perfect time for it to happen:
no one around to help me; me in a defenseless position”  --
he says that everything considered:
“Being asleep is FAR too risky a proposition for me!”
                             (“Jeeze! --  where d’ya think his bedroom is!”)