QotD: Our Mind Cuts the Universe in Two.

This is a remarkable bit of language here. The next time someone wants me to briefly summarize Buddha's message this is what they are going to get.

I did some editing, you can find the text I worked from here.

A primary cause of suffering is delusion: our inability, because of a subtly willful blindness, to see things the way they truly are. Instead we see things in a distorted way.

The world is in fact a seamless and dynamic unity: a single living organism that is constantly undergoing change. Our minds, however, chop it up into separate, static bits and pieces, which we then try mentally and physically to manipulate.

One of the mind's most dear creations is the idea of the person. Closest to home, it creates a very special person which each one of us calls "I": a separate, enduring ego or self.

At that instant the seamless universe is cut in two.

There is "I" -- and there is all the rest.

That means conflict -- and pain.

"I" cannot control that fathomless vastness against which it is set.

It will try, of course, as a flea might pit itself against an elephant, but it is a vain enterprise.

--John Snelling