A passenger plane travels close to 500mph, yet when I am on board I experience relative stillness because I relate to the capsule of the plane's interior rather than to the earth. This stillness is comforting – it allows my mind to forget the dangers of flying and worry about something else instead. 

We find that the mind is always encapsulating itself – locking itself in a room to avoid the distractions of the real world. Inside this room I can create a whole well-behaved world built on childish concepts such as eternity and God and logic, and then convince myself that this world is, in fact, more real than the world external to my mind – the world of which I am a part.

I forget the plane's motion when that motion is uniform – constant. As soon as the plane changes course I experience a pull and my mind is brought back to the fact that I am moving. If the changes in course start to follow a pattern then I will learn the pattern and reject it from my mind so that I can get on with my thinking. This is the way we use intelligence – to see and recognize patterns so that we can, we convince ourselves, understand, whereas really there is little understanding – little humility – involved, just a voracious desire to consume – to ingest and shit – at the expense of all the small but beautiful differences – details – that get washed away in the neurotic process of searching for meaning.

Spiritual understanding, on the other hand, is all about allowing an appreciation of reality's vastness belittle the self. I reduce myself by glorying in reality rather than increasing myself by "understanding" reality.