You might be thinking, ‘I don’t get this. I don’t understand this. Maybe I’m not the sort of person who will ever get this sort of thing.’

If so I’m going to suggest something that might not have been considered before in relation to the ‘I don’t get this’.

Because everything we are pointing to, the only thing to ‘get’ is that there is no objective separate self.

And that the idea of us as separate, as needing to get somewhere obscures the peace we are looking for.

And that self only exists in thought, in the mind. Only there.

In that moment of ‘I don’t get this’, the self appears. That is where it lives. That’s what gives it an existence, a form, a version. In that activity of ‘there should be something different here’. And in all of that activity and busyness – what goes unnoticed is that underneath all that noise, all there is peace.

The mind can only go so far with this but it is logical to notice that, if there were no thoughts about ‘me’, all that would be happening would be an apparent body sitting and or lying or standing, there would be apparent breathing, apparent reading or listening.

And if there was simply a mind engaged in working out the world, there would just be a mind engaged with working out the world. But now there is an idea of me complicating it.

All we are saying in this exploration is that the simplicity of being is the truth. That is the fundamental ‘is-ness’. That is the reality.

And that amazing kaleidoscope of selfing activity has always been taken as reality. It might be that there has never been any hint otherwise.

And now that activity of thought is going a bit haywire trying to be peaceful, trying to find the truth in all the noise. But the activity only increases the activity. All it is doing is hiding the fundamental peace of being.

It is too simple to be noticed. The being-ness, the simple presence, this absolute ‘I’, this existence is just what is.  All of the seeking is a momentary creation of a made up reality that hides the simple truth of being.

When, in reality, there is just what is.

So to sum up, when we are feeling that stress, tension, isolation, wanting, needing, trying – that is a film of self going on. It looks real information. But it is not.

And suffering is the sign of that confusion, of believing in a separate identity that doesn’t exist outside of thought.

We have always taken suffering as a sign to go deeper into the film, to take that illusory reality as objective truth.

That is the fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of all conflict, exhaustion, stress and confusion. It is the belief that the suffering (caused by illusory separation) will be resolved by going deeper into that ‘reality’ of separation.

Now we are considering the total opposite.

We are saying that the suffering is because the idea of separation – a separate objective me in a separate objective world – is momentarily believed.

The suffering is exceptionally reliable information. The suffering is saying ‘no answers in this’. When we wake up at 3am and thoughts are going crazy. There are no answers there. When we are trawling the internet, desperately googling symptoms to put the mind to rest, there are no answers there. How can there be? It is one insecurity after another. A rabbit warren of thought.

Everything we have been looking for is in the realisation of that. It has to be, because without that rabbit warren, there is just a body lying peacefully in bed. The peace is there already. The activity of thought obscures it.

But the identified mind doesn’t realise this. It looks in the rabbit warren for the peace and this only creates extension after extension to the warren.

The drama of the apparent reality obscures the fact that the space in which all this is happening – whatever word we want to use for it – consciousness, beingness, aliveness, unconditional love – that is what we are.

And we can go gently with this. There is nothing that has to change in the suffering. That is the paradox. All suffering takes on a different hue with new understanding. It does not have to be different.

The thought ‘I don’t get this’ is itself a miracle of creativity, imagination and love.

Nothing has to change.