Seeing Thought for What It Is
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A reflection on how turning attention toward thought itself reveals a dimension of seeing we rarely inhabit, and how the illusion of a solid self sits at the core of what we mistake for reality.
Seeing Thought for What It Is
A reflection on how turning attention toward thought itself reveals a dimension of seeing we rarely inhabit, and how the illusion of a solid self sits at the core of what we mistake for reality.
Any experience that challenges the mechanism of self can feel threatening. The only way to be free from that challenge takes perhaps two forms. One is grace: something entirely beyond your doing. The other is to look directly. In this kind of inquiry, there is hopefully a clarifying, so that what you are seeing becomes more known for what it is.
The alien metaphor
Let me put it this way. If I were to come into this world from a spaceship, arriving from another planet where everything is very different, I would see everything here, assuming sensation and perception work the same way, but I would have a hard time understanding what I was looking at. A computer, for instance, would make no sense to me. I would have many interpretations about what I was seeing, and most of them would be incorrect. Then someone who lives here could say, "No, actually this is this, and it works this way. That is that, and it works that way." That is what I am trying to provide.
A new dimension of seeing
As we look directly at thought and the mind, it is almost like we are moving into a dimension of seeing that is new. The metaphor of the alien arriving here does not totally apply, but in essence we normally function as if what we are thinking about is reality, as if the experience our thoughts are creating is real. Then, through this looking, we can start to perceive the difference between thoughts and reality.
The illusion at the core
What I was pointing to in the meditation is that at the core of all this sits one central illusion: the belief that what I think I am is real, and that I am actually that which I think I am.