So many times we think we are doing ourselves a favor when we are not. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, it is said.

Animals are "in the moment". They can't help but be. Animals lack the ability to think in language. One of the unique abilities of human language is called "Displacement." Displacement means a language can be used to communicate ideas about things that are not in the immediate vicinity of the being either spatially or temporally. It means you can essentially hallucinate things that aren't there, by conjuring their namesake, through words using language.

We're constantly "hallucinating" in this way, in a way that animals can't. We read books and live the lives of others. We feel their feelings. We see what they say. But we are not there. We are imagining it all by hallucinating in response to these symbolic sounds and writings that represent the sounds.

Then even when we are not reading, we are thinking to ourselves. This is another thing animals cannot do. This is due to our cortex, it is folded in a way that allows a physical and thus functional internal feedback loop to exist, thus we can think of a thought and express it to ourselves without saying it aloud, and then listen to it as if we had just heard it, which allows us to process it differently and repeatedly if we so choose. This is a superpower. The human superpower. But it is also a curse.

So many seek enlightenment. Freedom from suffering. But what is this? What is the root cause of the suffering?

We look and look. We use scientific reductionism to try and break it down. We are filled with unanswered questions, and every one answer just leads to ten more questions. We can never answer them all. So we pick and choose questions, trying to prioritize. But what are we prioritizing for? Emotions? Truth? Logic?

Albert Einstein said "If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions."

The hard part is finding the right question to ask. But why are we asking in the first place? What if we just stopped asking? What if all these questions are the problem in the first place? What if the suffering is just because you're crushed under the weight of all these damn questions, and your emotions have become all tangled up in it, and it's been that way for so long it's hard to imagine anything else?

The Buddha said it is easier to be free than it is to explain using language how to be free. It is immediate, it takes no huge strain. And it seems it can only be this way if it is a shedding, a tactical letting go, rather than an add-on or a forced state.

So when you let go of all the questions and this web of emotion attached to them, what's left? The immediate experience of the world around you in that moment, just like when you were a child. Just like the wordless mind of a dog. What's wrong in this moment? What question needs answered? If the answer is none, then why not set down all the endless unanswerable questions and the emotions associated with them?