The Spell of Thought
El Hechizo del Pensamiento
A reflection on how thought disguises itself as reality, creating a seamless illusion we rarely see through, and why we willingly participate in that illusion.
The Spell of Thought
A reflection on how thought disguises itself as reality, creating a seamless illusion we rarely see through, and why we willingly participate in that illusion.
You are seeing things through the veil of thought. Thought has this wonderful, magical power of interpreting reality. Because of this power, you are no longer experiencing thought as thought. You are experiencing what seems to be the nature of reality itself.
The movie analogy
It is like watching a movie and becoming so immersed that you forget you are watching a movie. Obviously, the second you think, "Oh yes, this is a movie," you know exactly what it is. Thought has that same quality, but we have a much harder time snapping out of it. We have a hard time stepping back to see, "Oh, this is thought." Instead, it is experienced as: this is the nature and reality of things. This is how things are.
Only thought can do this
Only thought can perform this kind of conversion. The direct experience of thought is always just what it is. It is always thought. But then our relationship to the mind has the ability to make a switch, so that suddenly it is no longer thought we are relating to. It is reality. And in that switch, in that moment where thought becomes "not thought anymore" but "reality," we get lost. One hundred percent of the time that we do this, we are in illusion, in confusion.
Why we keep choosing it
And yet we do it freely, because there is something gained. As a metaphor, imagine you are deeply anguished. You cannot tolerate your anguish, so you put a movie on and you forget about it. The movie ends, and you are back in anguish. But for a while, you had relief by going into the movie. It is exactly the same with thought, except that we have the ability to do it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.