*image by Ben Harubin

 

One An Important Fact, Hard To Keep In Mind (I Wonder Why):
The business of the mind is to think!
Not think about what it's thinking.

Now this, from our department of "Major Breakthroughs!" (Maybe.):
After years of struggling absolutely to the contrary, one man has presently
concluded that it's "probably okay" to go ahead and be as asleep as you've
always been, as long as you "pay attention to what you're doing!"

After the king had just been presented with a totally unexpected situation, his
prime minister said to him, "Well, I guess this gives you something to think about."
And to himself the monarch said, "But if I was truly as wise as I am believed to be,
then nothing would ever give me something to think about."

One man began to think of the experience that others have called
"waking up" and "being enlightened" as "I did it!"
(A bit further down the line he started to wonder if it should be "It did me.")

There was once a man who secretly placed listening devices in the homes of
both his enemies and those whom he admired, so that he could learn their
most personal thinking through hearing their most private talk.
But he eventually began to worry that they knew of his deception, and that
everything they said in conversation (and to themselves aloud) was done
solely to confuse and mislead him, and was never in any way sincere.

(You're not going to lower us both to the squalid position of having me add
a moral or concluding commentary to this story, are you?)

If the realization that you cannot think, period, outside the use of words,
and hence all thought is about words and nothing else, was held unbroken
long enough, it would surely scare the last vestiges of sleep out of the
weariest of you.