"...those idiots I call the unenlightened."

The above was a snippet of conversation I heard over lunch the other day. The irony of it amused me to no end, because I'm pretty sure that if you still consider some people to be idiots, that's a pretty strong indicator that you, yourself, are unenlightened.

The world is, after all, a perfect mirror for our own mind. So everything and everyone we encounter are pretty much like a smartass 4th grader who goes around saying, "I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks on you."

That little phrase also reminds me of an experience I had a few times when I was living in Bali. Because the Balinese have a rather more flexible sense of time than we do (they call it "rubber time"), we'd often find ourselves just kind of hanging around, maybe waiting for someone, with nothing particular to do. Our Balinese friends, probably sensing our American discomfort of having nothing to do, would invariably say something like, "Are you boring?" And we would laugh at the grammatical error, think, yes we're terribly bored, and then emphatically answer, "No, of course we're not boring." Because no one wants to admit being boring. But as my meditation teacher once pointed out: Bored only happens to the boring.

So, if we think, "idiots" - that's the world/people reflecting the irritation, annoyance, pride in our own mind. We think that the way to avoid idiots is to, well, avoid idiots. By being brusque with people we find irritating, honking at the annoying driver, joining groups opposing them on facebook. And maybe we think, what's wrong with that? Well, maybe nothing, if it worked. But it doesn't. The more irritated we become, the more idiots appear.

The only real way to get rid of idiots is to get rid of the annoyance, irritation, impatience in our own mind. Which doesn't seem like it would work, but it does. First, the things that used to annoy us, and then, as if by magic, people actually sometimes change their behavior. It can seem coincidental the first time it happens, but after awhile...

Or maybe we might think, "I'm just imagining it." To which the Buddha might say, "You're just imagining everything, you might as well imagine something good." Like maybe a world with no idiots.