Mysterious Stranger

I woke up in the middle of the night last evening - let's say around 3:30 a.m. or so.  I rolled over and tried to immediately fall back asleep but to no avail.  I decided to go to the kitchen and drink a sip or two of water before trying to sleep again.

I didn't turn the kitchen light on because I didn't want to awake myself any more fully, and besides there's enough ambient light  from the urban environment coming in through the windows, not to mention all the LCD displays on the appliances, especially once the refrigerator's open.  I stumbled around briefly, opened the fridge, and swigged a few sips of Vitamin Water's orange-flavored Rise.    

It would be an understatement to say I was surprised when I noticed someone standing outside looking in through the kitchen window.  What were they doing out there?  Were they just waiting for the off chance that I might be up at 3:30 a.m.?  Were they hoping that I wasn't up?  Either way, why were they just standing there and not moving?

Adrenaline rush.  Okay, now I was fully awake.

It turns out it wasn't a person at all, but a rag hanging from a ladder that the roofers had left overnight before they finished the job this morning.  They did a good job of cleaning up the property after they finished today, but overnight it looked like a demolition site.  The pinkish rag hanging from the ladder caught me by surprise last night, and my mind immediately interpreted it as a person, until I noticed it wasn't moving and then, on closer inspection, realized what it actually was. 

I felt ridiculous for reacting as I had, and once my mind understood what the object actually was, I couldn't imagine how I had initially seen it as a "person."  But nature or instinct has evolved with us to be alert to potential threats but sometimes that instinct misfires and misidentifies some harmless thing as a threat.  It's probably more useful for survival to be wired that way than, say, the opposite - to assume everything's harmless unless closer inspection reveals a threat.  

Our mind is continuously encountering countless phenomena - the Buddha called them "the myriad dharmas."  Subconsciously, our mind categorizes all those phenomena and identifies some as useful and possibly pleasurable, and others as hostile and potentially harmful.  But the vast majority of phenomena fall into neither category and are simple ignored.  Many don't even register in our consciousness at all.  

We'd never make it through the day if we had to consider the possible benefit or threat posed by every object that enters our field of sight - the laces on a passer-by's shoes, the car parked on a side street, a distant tree in the park.  The problem, however, is that we don't even notice most of what appears before us.  It's our life and we're missing it.

The problem is that a silly ROM freaks out at 3:30 a.m. over a rag hanging from a ladder.