You cannot order your mind to be still, any more than you can order the sea. But you can learn to sail it, and the sailing rests on the one thing most people skip: the body.

Most of what you call "me" was born into you, poured into you as a child, or worn into you by your own past. You did not choose most of it, and none of it is fixed. The settings menu was never locked.

Most of your choices are made half a second before you show up to sign for them and take the credit. Whatever freedom you have lives in that gap, and you can learn to widen it.

After I had looked hard at what was actually there, I could not go on without looking at the thing that had been doing the looking all along. Every claim I had checked, every picture of the world I had pulled apart, had passed through one instrument before I ever got to weigh it. That instrument was my own mind. And I had never once turned around to examine the instrument.