Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about skepticism versus discernment and curiosity. So there's an old Zen story about this. There was a man who was born blind and he said, "I do not believe in the world of light and appearance. There are no colors, bright or dull.

There's no sun, no moon, no stars. I don't believe that anyone has witnessed these things." Now, his friends tried to argue with him about this, but he clung to his opinion. "What you say you see are illusions," he said."If colors existed, I should be able to touch them. They clearly have no existence and are not real. They have no weight, no substance.

I feel no substance, no weight where you see colors. So clearly they don't exist." Then one day a doctor was called to see this blind man. He mixed up a medicine which he applied to the cataracts and the blind man's eyes. And as he mixed this mixture into his eyes and the cataracts melted suddenly a whole new world and reality opened up before him. He suddenly took in all the light he could not see.

In some ways we have a similarity with the blind man, because if we've not experienced something directly, sometimes we have this insistence or this idea that it's not possible. It's just fanciful thinking. So when it comes to your own mind, for instance, maybe you haven't had a chance yet to glimpse the possibilities laying dormant there. You may have heard some teachers or some wisdom traditions, or even modern neuroscience talking about the possibility of easing suffering and stress and finding a sense of wholeness, oneness, and inner peace. But if you've never felt it yourself, you might have a lot of skepticism and doubt about that.

Now it's important to know that skepticism has its purpose and we don't want to just go around believing everything that people tell us and being kind of naive. But on the other hand, skepticism can block us off from new experiences and possibilities. So rather than seeing skepticism as an altogether bad thing, I'd invite you to just make a slight pivot and reorient to a healthier curiosity. So think about being an investigator, an explorer of your own direct experience, rather than just believing or disbelieving what somebody tells you. So just being interested and open to exploring mindfulness and meditation for yourself.

Giving the practice a go for a number of days, weeks or months and then checking in with yourself. Is this making a difference? What kind of difference? In this way we can find our own direct experience to be the most important part of our discovery process. So instead of coming to this practice already having made up your mind, instead, we lay aside our assumptions, preconceived ideas and opinions, and instead make the effort to know and see for ourselves. So as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us and just inviting you now to settle in for today's meditation.