The old woman looked at the little boy and said in a knowing tone, “the mind is a mysterious badger” and disappeared in a puff of smoke as wrinkly as the old woman. The little boy had no idea what she was talking about but thought about her words long after. He concluded that she might have been meaning to draw similarities between the mind’s thirst for knowledge and the badger’s omnivorous appetite and willingness to burrow through anything, even holes in the ground, in order to get a morsel of food. He thought that his mind was also willing to burrow through anything to get answers to questions or make new discoveries. He thought about a badger’s fur and wondered if there was a mind fur similar to badger fur and concluded that there was but was unsure of what mind fur might actually be. He only knew it existed and this ability to know something without proof, he further concluded, must be the mystery the old woman referred to. The little boy was amazed at this aspect of the nature of reality and badgers and set off on a journey to discover actual evidence of mind fur and to study it and learn its purpose. His journey took him throughout the world as he thoroughly searched and searched for mind fur. One day, exhausted from the intensity of his inquisition, he laid down in the grass and ran his fingers through the blades feeling their texture and tickle against his skin and touching the tips of the blades to feel their gentle prick. He began to feel a familiar sensation coursing through his fingers into hands and through his arms. He realized it was the feeling of thoughts forming and traveling and informing his body of the new information they carried. He was astonished that his hand would generate thoughts when he knew that thoughts were the providence of the mind, not the hand or limbs. He looked closely at his hand as it laid there in the grass and realized that thought stimulators were crawling up the blades of grass and into his fingers causing his hand to generate the thoughts that were now traveling through the entirety of his body. In the instant he saw this, he knew that he had found the mind fur he had been seeking and he was astonished that it was simply the grass that grew on the earth and that the grass was not just the grass everyone thought it was but rather it was so much more. It occurred to him that where there was mind fur there must be a mind and he realized that just below the grass he way laying on, there was a mind and that the mind was in all actuality the size of the earth and that the earth was not just a gigantic planet but that it was in fact a gigantic mind as well. As the thought stimulators continued to crawl through his fingers and generate thoughts, he savored everything that he was thinking of and all the things he was learning and all the additional questions that began to stack up in his mind, where ever that was.
