It’s a funny world we live in.

In the city’s skyline, only the brightest stars greet us through the air pollution. Man thinks as if he is separate from nature, that he is set apart from it. But this same man shares 60% of his DNA with a banana, rebirths his cellular composition regularly, and relies on nature’s essential gifts of air and water to even fathom and speak of his superiority.

In the same city, a man laments his life — he is tormented by his circumstances. He feels unrich, unhappy, and unjustly done by. But the same man would be loathed to be a peasant in the middle ages, a monkey in the animal laboratory, or a typical Roman slave. He makes his complaint from upon the genetic, material, and intellectual shoulders of his forefathers, who toiled hard in every way, in triumph and in vain, to platform his position.

In the ever-fog of numbers, concepts, and expectations, humanity labours to subordinate the perceived problems of its time to its self-conceived ideas of virtue. But rarely questions deeply for whom, why, and how these ideas are so; that is, the nature of the day’s virtues. We question ourselves often when it is rather too late, only until it is realised that the so-called virtuous pursuits have created yet more problems.

Oh how progress can be so real and so illusory! The greater we have ascended to the heights, the greater we have risked falling into the depths.

Within the dimensional kitchen of its current assumptions and beliefs, the knife of the intellect is at its sharpest and is most skillfully used, but it renders itself dulled and lame in the spaces where content fitting the axioms and needs of its time cannot be found. In this way, the mind plays both the sage and the trickster. This is why we remind ourselves of the need to ‘think outside the box’, as this issue has been realised again and again.

The problem? Like a kind of generative algorithm, the mind both resolves and creates its own labyrinth. One of suffering, hope, solutions, and yet more problems. There are individual labyrinths, as well as great collective labyrinths.

What can we learn from those who live more outside of these labyrinths — say, the innocent and unthinking child, or the Tibetan monk? There is simplicity, a natural urge to fairness, a will to be themselves, to spontaneity, an ability to spring forth a kind of insight that is untainted by the rather cold abstractions much of us are accustomed to using.

The long and winding road of man’s imperfections is a path necessary for near-all of us. It is so great, confusing, and vast that, if one does find their right way on their quest for peace and wholeness, they are shocked to find that they have arrived back to where they had started!

But that does not change the fact of their journey. After that is a wisdom of a dual nature; a clear and yet sharp mind, and a seasoned yet wise heart, and then a kind of knowing that arises between the two, like a rainbow that is ungraspable in itself but is viewed as a bridge between its two arches.

Let me make no mistake. The mind is fun, it is beautiful, it has its wisdom, but it is not the only lens around for making sense of existence. At its best, the mind is the midwife of truth, and it is true too that at its worst the mind is also the midwife of falsity, suffering, and conflict. The world makes both of these truths clear, depending on when and where one looks.

Absorbing this insight, a life of open-mindedness, a willingness to enter new territories of thinking and being, and a sympathy for the mind itself, is all that is needed to drink up life fully, and to take meaning from it.

This commitment is like riding an electric bull; you should expect to be thrown off every so often! But with time, staying upon this saddle will get easier, and this bull will settle down; making way for clearer vision, and steadier orientation.