mind? what mind?

…The body in which one can see the truth will die out, like a fan palm, without any future. But that which is the truth, that which is existence itself, is there although it is deep and infinitely hard to understand. Like the great ocean, one cannot fathom it.

- Digha Nikaya

“Truth” – with a capital ‘T’ – eludes me.  I’ve said it before: the longer I live, the less I know.  “I know about many things, but I know nothing”, and I understand even less.  Can a human mind truly grasp the enormity of the number of drops of water that there are the oceans of Earth?  Or even in a small lake?  The number is – at least to a yokel like me – beyond understanding.  How many grains of sand are there on a beach?  How many cells make up our bodies?  Astronomer’s estimates tell us that there are approximately 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) stars in our galaxy alone.  If I were to attempt to count the stars, pointing to one each second, it would take me nearly 190,258 years to count them all.  At least for me, while having an intellectual knowledge of “100 billion”, a number that large really is beyond my comprehension.  There are some “primitive” peoples still living in our world whose languages do not include the concept of numbers larger than, say, 10.  Any number larger than that is simply called “many”.

Do we need to understand how many grains of sand there are on a beach?  No, of course not.  It is not relevant to my physical survival, nor is it relevant to my mental or my spiritual health.  Granted, sitting on a beach can be very pleasurable – as long the beach is in the tropics and not the polar regions of our Earth.  Knowing how many drops of water are in each wavelet that tumbles onto the sand and then retreats back to do it again, is not necessary for the relaxation and/or peace that we can feel sitting there.