Everything that I’m about to say is a lie. Hopefully it’s a useful lie.

If we start with something that we all take for granted, the only permanence is change. Although that itself isn’t strictly correct either, but it is a truth. Where there are beginnings there are ends. And everything we know has a beginning and an end. Wherever there is a quality there is the opposite of that quality and there is a beginning and end to the quality. There is no intrinsic quality, nothing which is intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad for that matter.

What is isolated out separated out is impermanent. And the idea of its permanence is an illusion created by our minds. It is the idea that any quality is permanent that is an illusion.

Yet, somehow there is mind, free of content. Not a mind, but mind. Itself not dependent on the fluctuations of matter. Unlike our ego mind dependent on a concept of self. Dependent on a constellation of particular qualities. The self that surely dies.

It is the mind that hears without conceptualising what is heard, independent of all qualities, like our change, ever present in the here and now, always as it is, which is the most ordinary thing of all. Ordinary, constant, and fully awake. It is the flip side to ever changing form. The form which is the mind’s content.

By looking for what is special we miss the ever present awareness. And that’s what our egos are; an illusion that there is a story, a drama, that is our special reality. A reality that will vanish in a puff of smoke at our death, physical or otherwise. Our sense of self, like this diatribe here is a lie, but which is the more useful lie.