A Boy Learns to Meditate
Pretty much all humans can do is think. It is quite a double-edged sword that we can think, in fact. Not only do we feel the need to search for the truth, but the only companion we have on the journey is our thinking machine. To be specific, one's own thinking machine, as opposed to anyone else's.
It doesn't start off as a trusted companion. We sort of follow in its footsteps for a while. We take a while to level-up past dealing with our basic needs. On the other hand, our thinking machines are up and running from the get-go, and never seem to need to align themselves with anything in particular.
At some point, you turn to your thinking machine and say something along the lines of
"Hey, I notice that you're doing a lot of thinking, but I'm not really satisfied. In fact, all you do is think and subliminally fuse those thoughts into me, but it's not leading me anywhere. Can we go somewhere? I know I want to go somewhere and I know I need you to help me get there, but I only really know directionally where I want to end up and I assume that along the way you and I will figure out what we are doing."
Naturally, your thinking machine doesn't respond, it just keeps chugging along in the manner you have always known it to. But you can tell that you are now on a journey. Which you must be, since your thinking machine is now thinking about it.
This quest leads you to all sorts of new things. You read the word "meme" for the first time. It's around this time you start wondering what memes have influenced your life up to this point. You start considering what you could have been like otherwise, but it's a bit hard conceptually and you feel stuck. You're naturally skeptical of asking your thinking machine anything by this point, but you shrug and give it a shot. After all, you couldn't have made it here without your thinking machine and you're more skeptical of its capability to respond than you are that it will be wrong or misleading.
Thinking machine: ...
Okay ... ? You're quite unsure of what this means so you decide to take some time to think about it. You face palm and realize that you don't have a good way to think about it. It's not like you can offload this one to the thinking machine, and anyway it's not being as helpful as you wanted (but didn't expect) it to be.
So you can't just ask the thinking machine why it thinks the way it thinks. Seems obvious enough, you also tend to flounder when someone asks you why you think the way you think. You could answer truthfully, you could try to explain your perception of what happens. You could try to say something like:
Well it's not really me, you see? I mean I'm the one talking to you and I certainly want to give you an answer. In fact, I want a lot of things. But you're asking the wrong fellow! I have a friend. It's my companion and I've been with it for as long as I can remember and I mostly have a good relationship with it except for a couple times during childhood and more recently when I've not been getting answers to some of the questions I've been asking it. But really and truly, it does the thinking! Once it does the thinking I know the thoughts and the rest follows. It doesn't know me any better than you do, I swear!
You always reflect on what you really mean by childhood when you say this. Maybe it's something like before you asked your thinking machine to go somewhere with you. In any case, you know it's hard to reason about why you think what you think, so you don't hold it against your thinking machine. But something always nags at you. While you distract yourself with other things, a low voice contends:
Should not you, of all beings, a veritable thinking machine, be able to explain why you think what you think?
Or at least think about it? You sit down, and it starts to make sense. You can't keep asking it to explain itself, for it cannot.
What you instead do is observe yourself. You reason that your own actions are intentioned by your thoughts, and by observing those actions you will understand your thoughts, and thus you will hear the answer of your thinking machine. In a sense, you are tuning yourself to its frequency.
You sit for a moment and it begins to click. Your thinking machine was trying to contact you this whole time. It was trying to explain itself, justify every thought it had, and convince you that it could hear you. Better late than never. You begin to listen.
Having listened for a bit, you feel a little less in control. In a peculiar way, you act a little more like what you saw rather than what you are. You notice a danger in this, that you might become not by being, but by trying to be.