We keep asking questions because something hurts. We want to understand suffering, loss, fear, and the problems that appear in our relationships. We ask what life means, who wrote the book of love, why this body feels tired, why the mind keeps searching. These questions often receive lofty, polished answers. Answers which are philosophical, spiritual, intelligent. Answers that sound right. We nod, but nothing actually changes. The grief still tightens the chest. The resentment still shows up. The body still aches. The answers do not land because they are not lived. They remain ideas held up like tinted glass, filtering experience instead of meeting it.
No degree or application of any particular practice will teach us to exchange this mind for another one or substitute this body for someone else’s. We are not here to train ourselves into new, improved versions. This tired old body is not the problem; it is the answer. When we try harder, sit longer, or search more intensely... We just find that sitting long becomes tiring. Not because something is wrong, but because we are still trying to get somewhere. The fantasy that endurance equals enlightenment quietly collapses. The tiredness is not an obstacle; it is feedback. It asks us to notice the wanting beneath the posture, the belief that something else should be happening, that arrival is always later.
As soon as a simple truth is turned into a big truth, we leave this moment. We hand our senses over to the idea and return to searching through the rooms of the mind, looking for the governor of the self, the inner authority that can certify meaning and issue conclusions. The search feels virtuous and intelligent, so it goes unexamined. We never stop to wonder who is conducting the search. Cleverness steps in, reframing, summarizing, interpreting, turning sensation into insight and vulnerability into explanation. Cleverness is not intelligence; it is evasion. It always arrives after the moment. “No cleverness allowed” is not a rejection of thought but a refusal of distance. Here, you do not get to stand outside and comment. You have to be in it.
Repeating the words of the wise feels safe. Borrowed language already sounds meaningful, but without being earned in immediate experience, those words harden into clichés. Clichés do not simply go dead; they actively blind us to what is happening. What is missing is not information, revelation, or retreat. Nothing special needs to happen. The lessons are occurring now, all around us, and we consistently ignore them. The question is no longer abstract. It is intimate: how will you uniquely realize this? Not understand it, not agree with it, but make it real.
Listen to yourself, if you can. Not to commentary or beliefs, but to the quieter signals. The hesitations, the bodily knowing, the unease you rush past. Simple truth stays simple because it keeps returning you to sensation, humility, and not-knowing. Big truth recruits abstraction and postponement. The moment you stop searching for the one who knows, you are already closer than any answer could take you. What remains is raw, slightly awkward, unpolished immediacy: breathing, thinking, feeling, being here. You may find a kind of greatness there; not performance, not improvement, but unmediated contact with your own life. That greatness is rarely known because it cannot be quoted, owned, or optimized. It does not sound impressive. It is believable. And it is already happening.
