Falling into grace

I’m reading Falling into Grace, by Adyashanti right now. I wanted to share these few paragraphs on page 2 and 3 because they simply delighted me. The author is speaking as an adult and remembering his childhood:

As I watched and observed, day after day, week after week, month after month, even year after year, one day I had an epiphany: “Oh my gosh! Adults believe what they think! That’s why they suffer! That’s why they get into conflict. That’s why they behave strangely, in ways that I don’t understand, because they actually believe the thoughts in their head.”

Now, to a little child, this was actually quite a strange notion. It was a very foreign idea to me. Of course I had ideas in my head, but when I was a child, I didn’t walk around like adults do, with a running, continuous commentary going on in my mind. Basically, I was too busy having fun, or listening, or being mesmerized or amazed by some aspect of life. What I realized was that adults spent a lot of time thinking, and more important than that—and more odd, it seemed to me—they actually believed what they were thinking. They believed the thoughts in their head.

All of a sudden, I had an understanding of what was happening when adults communicated with one another; that what people were in fact communicating were their thoughts, and that each person believed that what they thought was actually true. The problem was that all of the different adults had different ideas about what they thought the truth was, and so when they communicated there was this unspoken negotiation, this attempt to win each other over and to defend one’s thinking and beliefs. As I continued to observe how adults believed their thinking, it struck me, “They’re insane! I understand them now: They’re insane.” — Adyashanti, Falling into Grace