Evolution of love

THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVED THEIR THINKING!

When I was a young child, about seven or eight years old, one of the things I started to notice and ponder as I watched the adults around me was that the adult world is prone to suffering, pain, and conflict. Even though I grew up in a relatively healthy household with loving parents and two sisters, and actually had quite a wonderful and happy childhood, I still saw a great deal of pain around me.
As I looked at the adult world, I wondered ‘How is it that people come into conflict?
As a child, I also happened to be a great listener—some may even say an eavesdropper. I would listen to every conversation that went on in the house. In fact, it was a family joke that nothing happened in the house without me knowing about it. I liked to know everything that was going on around me, and so I spent a lot of my childhood listening to the conversations of adults…
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, 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 that that – and more odd, it seemed to me – they actually believed what they were thinking. They believed the thoughts in their head.