The other night, I was lying in bed before sleeping. The house was still, my wife asleep beside me, my dog snoring softly in her bed across the room. Amid this deep quiet, I began to try to feel all of the sensations that were rising to my mind from each of the senses. And it was chaos — it’s said that the human mind receives something like 11 billion bits of information per second.

Yet we cling to the notion that what we filter down from this (something like 50 bits of information per second) and construct as “reality”, is indeed somehow real, correct, reliable. Even at the level of the conscious mind (let alone what must be brewing beneath consciousness in the billions of bits of incoming information that are automatically filtered out) our thoughts are perpetual and overwhelming — 50 bits of information per second reaching the conscious mind; that conscious mind triggering 50 or more thoughts per second in response; and each of those thoughts in turn reverberating in more thoughts…

Exhausting

Then look back over a life of more than sixty years, and consider how this storm of thoughts has swirled and multiplied, perpetually fighting within itself to be “heard” — the never ending struggle of the habitual mind.

And to what end? Nothing much. Nothing very much at all…