Thinking Cage

We think a lot. Maybe we think too much. We think and we identify. We think and we assess and we categorize and classify. We decide who we are. We decide what is and what is not. We decide how and when and where. We solidify everything, everything in motion and everything at rest, with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we build safe, inescapable cages.
All too often I hear tourists in Laos say, ‘Oh, the Laos people are so friendly.’ They find the people of this country to be so friendly and happy and kind and genuine. People remark on how babies don’t cry and children sit patiently on busses. They remark on how women will sit not waiting, not being patient, not being anything at all; they will just sit, as if they have transcended patience and impatience and all that is in between. People remark on how friendly the Laos people are. This, too, is a trap.
The Laos people are not innocent nor naïve. They are not beyond suffering or hatred or greed or violence. In contrast to the west, they are indeed far more healthy in their mindset, but there is more to the Laos demeanor than the very friendly face the passer by might witness.
It is fine to have illusions, if you like. It is fine to think ‘Life is X’. It is fine to think ‘I am Y’. It is fine to think ‘You are Z’. It is fine to think ‘Laos people are always friendly’. But know that this illusion is a cage that may disintegrate at any moment with no notice. When your marriage fails, friends evaporate, health turns sour, what will you do? When a jaded Laos person shows their racist hatred, how will you exist now that you have been thrown from your cage? Will you have the energy to redefine your world? Will you have the time to restructure while your illusions burn? Will you have the clarity to define satisfactory new illusions to build a new cage? Will you like your new cage?
Throw away the bars. Throw away the bricks. Throw away the chains. Find freedom without your cage. You can not find freedom outside your cage in the same way you can not find freedom within your cage. You must find freedom with no cage at all. Look for your freedom without definitions and categories and assessments. When you have found this, you will be free. When you have thrown away the shackles of dogma, the bars of subjective thought, the oh-so-breathless, oh-so-shapely, oh-so-accepted corset of mental modification, you have found the natural state, the Buddha-mind, the Brahmin which exists within us all.