The Reality of Thought
La Realidad del Pensamiento
A student asks how thoughts can be seen as open and loving when they so often trigger emotional contraction, leading to an exploration of how belief in thought creates and sustains emotional reactivity.
The Reality of Thought
A student asks how thoughts can be seen as open and loving when they so often trigger emotional contraction, leading to an exploration of how belief in thought creates and sustains emotional reactivity.
You said that this warm, loving openness is in the thoughts. When you said that, the one thing that occurred to me is that thoughts are the one place I don't experience it, or at least it varies. Thoughts are often the thing that seems not open or loving. But maybe you weren't talking about thoughts specifically. Maybe you were talking about openness to the thoughts, or just the thoughts appearing rather than their content. I wasn't quite sure. Could you elaborate on how you see that?
Yes, that was deliberate, because it's where things seem to be tricky. What matters is the nature of thought. Because we don't recognize the nature of thought, we confuse thought to be something other than it is. If we think of tomorrow, we think we're experiencing tomorrow, some reality of tomorrow, some aspect of reality. When we think of some problem at work, a relationship, or a person, we think we are experiencing some real aspect of a person or some actual problem at work. But all we're experiencing is thought.
Thought as play
As children, when we were new to thought, it was often magical. It was just this ability to create, to imagine, to play. Thought was a playground. Children can spend hours on their own, imagining, talking to themselves, exploring a whole world of creativity and imagination.
But then we confuse the creations of thought with aspects of reality. There is an aspect of thought that becomes taken as actual reality. The thought of a person, in a sense, becomes not that distinguishable from the person itself. It's not one-to-one, but there is a certain essential quality: when I am lost in thought thinking about some person, there is a sense that this is the actual person, that the thought has a reality to do with that person. That's why these things become very sticky, because we have to undo a deep belief in their reality.
So a narrative could be questioned. This person seems to have done this thing, they intended that, and there's a whole story around it. But it's not seen for what it is: one hundred percent my imagination, my thought, my creation. It could still be useful or practical, but there is a forgetting that it is one hundred percent imagination. And we could imagine something completely different if we chose to.
To me, though, it feels more like the body just responds to whatever the thought is. It doesn't feel real to me. I don't get lost in the narrative. A thought comes up, like "my dad shouldn't have done that," and then the body just responds as if it's real. So it feels like it's not about me believing in the thought. It's more of a reaction that happens. I'm not sure if that's different from what you're saying.
Do you have an example? Is that a real one?
It's a real example. When I was just sitting here in the sensations and the sounds, that obvious loving openness was clear to me. Everything is that, that childlike wonder. But then a thought arose about something my father did, and all of a sudden the body felt contracted. Then I might be back in the sensations after that.
Can you share what your dad did?
I don't remember the specific thought, but what my dad did was react to my wanting some space by saying, "You're so disappointing, you're always disappointing me." He sent those texts to me. At the time there was more of a reaction, but even in the meditation just now, that image, that text, came back to mind, and the body contracted. It's not like I'm believing it's an actual thing. It's more like it creates a reaction.
The role of belief in emotional reaction
This is where it gets tricky, because it has to do with how much you can see, or how much you're able or willing to see, that you don't know. For example, what you just said your dad did: are you sure he did that?
Well, those are the words he said.
How do you know those words?
It gets a little tricky there because it's hard to know. The text came on the screen, but yes.
And you're remembering it now. So it's based on memory.
Yes.
Memory, I think you would agree, is far from accurate. But even if it is accurate, you're basing this on thought and memory, which is a kind of replaying of imagination. And then there is an assumption that it actually happened: that there was a person called "father" who sent messages with certain intentions that are assumed to be true.
For there to be an emotional reaction, there has to be a belief in some part of that imagination. The belief is more like an assumption that it's true, that it's real. It's not experienced as a deliberate belief. It's not like being asked, "Do you believe in God?" where you can make a conscious choice and say yes or no. It's not consciously believed. It's just an assumption that this is reality, and that assumption operates beyond the knowing of it as thought.
The mirage and the oasis
One metaphor I use is the difference between an oasis in a desert and a mirage. At a certain level, the experience is the same until you get closer and discover whether there is water or not. But immediately, the experience of the mirage incites the sense that there's water there. There is a projection onto a reality beyond thought.
But wouldn't it create thirst either way? If a mirage comes to mind, wouldn't I become thirsty, or excited, or anticipating water?
In the metaphor, the thirst is already there. You're thirsty, you see a mirage, and the hope is elicited by the belief that there's actual water.
That's where I get stuck with this. That hope, or that reaction of "that interaction with my father sucked," is like a feeling of "yuck." That's where it comes in. It's almost like the hope in the water is the same thing that happens whenever that thought shows up. You're saying I have to believe the thought is real for the reaction to occur?
There needs to be a belief that happens subconsciously. It's become automatic, something we overlook. We've done it over and over again until it becomes like riding a bicycle. You're not consciously thinking of each movement. You've just assumed that if you pedal, you're going to go forward, and it keeps happening.
With thought, the same thing occurs. And because of the emotional reaction, we take that reaction as a form of validation of the reality. So: I have a thought that my father did this thing, which I assume to be the thing he did, with the intentions I assume he had, that I imagine and project he had. That creates an emotional reaction based on the underlying narrative I've imagined. That could be a form of pain, a sense of having been rejected or not cared for. And that reaction validates the story: "Yes, my father did this hurtful thing. I'm feeling the hurt from it, so the hurtful thing he did must be true." It's a cycle.
Thought as a tool
What I'm proposing is that when all of this is seen through, it can be recognized as entirely thought, and all of that emotional reactivity simply disappears. It becomes like a choice, the way a child is imagining playing at war with some toys. It elicits this excitement of war, but the minute that play becomes boring, it stops. The next game is invited. There's a change. It's seen as something purely out of one's own creativity.
Then thought becomes a tool, a very powerful tool, because it can elicit emotions and it can problem-solve. But you see through it from the other side. You can look at a relationship where something has happened, examine the assumptions, drop the ones that are obviously huge assumptions, keep the ones that seem more reasonable, and then work with that if it's useful and practical. For example, if this were an active relationship, there could be a conversation: "When you said this, I assumed there was this kind of intention. I felt it was a bit disrespectful or painful." And in that dialogue, things could be cleared up.
But in the moment, when that thought arises, how do I see it clearly right there? Not in the practicality of it, but how do I see through it so that it doesn't create that reaction?
Just look at how there is a habitual choice. It's something that's always chosen in the moment, but it's become a habit, something running in the background that gets forgotten. The choice involves an assumption that the thought is real, meaning it has a reality beyond the thought itself: "I'm assuming there's water, even though all I know now is the appearance of water." I don't yet know if it's water or a mirage, but I'm assuming there's water.
This works both ways, positive and negative. On the negative side, there are the fears, the imaginings of ghosts, the metaphor of a ghost under the bed. There's a sense that there's something there, and it's really hard to shake that sense. But I have to look in order to see it's just imagination. So on one side, thought creates a false sense of hope for something better or somewhere else. On the other, it creates a false fear of something bad happening now.
So "not real" means: the thought is just made of thought-stuff. It's not relating to anything outside itself. It's just made of words or images. Is that right?
It is one hundred percent thought. Even emotions are thought-based. When you see that none of it is absolutely real, then you're free to use thought in a practical sense. But ninety-nine percent of the problems we're working out in thought are imagined, fully fictional.
The loop of reaction
So when the thought arises, I see it's an assumption. I know it's not real. But it's like there's still something I'm assigning to it, and it's very subtle. I want to make sure I'm really getting what you're saying, because this feels quite subtle. The thought of my father and what he did comes up. I see it as just a thought. I know it's not real in terms of here and now. But something still happens.
Or even back then, when it happened. At best, that memory is an approximation which still has only the perspective of your experience, not what was within his experience. His intention behind the action is assumed, and it is often not what we imagine.
So it's really not even useful at all? It's just this thing that happens and doesn't refer to anything?
It can be useful. But as we see through the reasons why we create illusions, we can use thought for practical reasons rather than for propagating the illusion. In Advaita, this would be called ignorance: the reinforcing of an idea of "me here" separate from "that there," and the belief that I am at risk, something is lacking, I need to do something to fix it, and it has to be tomorrow, not here and now, in the next moment, not here and now. That's the underlying narrative that is chosen. And it's not chosen by the habit of the mind and the body. It's chosen by that which is our true nature.
When you're trying to disentangle this, I can see the stuff about separation. Where I think it really hits is the emotional triggers. When I have a thought and it hits an emotion, that makes it seem real. Whereas separation, I can see there's no basis for it. It doesn't have the same trigger inside, the same sadness or pain.
There's a more subtle thing happening there. It's not that the emotional reaction makes it seem real. There is an assumption that it's real. Without that assumption, there wouldn't be an emotional reaction. The emotional reaction is then used as a kind of self-denial mechanism, because we are creating that reaction. It's like saying: I have a thought, and emotionally it cuts. "Oh, that hurts." But I'm creating that emotional reaction by believing that this cuts. And then, because it hurts in the imagination of emotion, I use it as a way to validate to myself that this actually cuts.
So it's like a loop.
Yes. It is called imaginary. Once we see "I'm imagining this," then we can have that thought and there's no pain. It just falls away and dissolves. It becomes almost impossible to recreate negative emotion, because it's just the play of imagination, like a child's play.
The child who believes the game is real
Only if a child suddenly believes that the war he's playing with his toys is actually happening outside does he become terrified. Then he becomes a victim of it. But it's only by believing that this thing I'm imagining is real and happening outside of my imagination, in my surroundings, that I feel I have no control over it, because "it's really happening, it's not from my imagination."
And you can project it forward as something that could happen, or backward as something that did happen.
The whole narrative in time and space, involving me and others. But the moment the child knows it's play, he can just stop and move on to something else. There will still be excitement and fear. I've just spent some time with my family, and I can see my five-year-old nephew scare himself half to death playing. His face will be in terror, and I check: "Are you actually afraid? Are you okay?" Then he has this release of excitement. He's actually fine. He's just playing, getting the thrill of going to an edge where he's scaring himself. But the moment that suddenly becomes real and outside of that play, real fear can happen, and then there's this sense of being a victim: "It just happened to me, I have no control over this."
What happens is that the narratives we've repeated get externalized as reality. We forget we've done that, and then we're constantly trying to solve them, because it's the reality we are in. We take it to be objective reality. That's the imagination. That's the projection.
I've seen this recently with elections, where both sides are terrified. The amount of fear people generate over the possible outcome of the "wrong" candidate being elected is staggering. I've been in conversations where the massive fear and projection of how horrible things will become is just gigantic.
As long as it's play, it's fine. But as soon as it becomes more than play, then it's a problem. That's helpful.
Thought, and then the world
First we see through thought and realize it is only thought, that it is play. Then it can be useful and practical. But there's a whole other level, where the reality of what we could call the external world is also seen as created by source.
Created in play and thought, you mean?
I would call it big mind, if we're talking about thought. But I'm talking about humanity, planets, the universe. The reality which is taken to be objective reality is also seen to be relative and not absolutely real.
The first step is this: the reality of thought is always absolutely relative and imagined, never absolutely real or true as a representation of the objective world. But the same applies to the reality of the objective world itself.
Maybe that's what Jung would call the collective unconscious? Are you saying it's like a more collective projection by humanity?
It is your creation, but the "you" I'm referring to is not the personal self. It is the same "you" that is the I Am, that is all. And that, too, is relative, not absolutely real. This is what is meant when it's said that the world is illusion. The actual world: matter, what we call matter, planets, people, bodies, minds, animals, all of it. I don't call it illusory, because I'm very precise with that word. But I will say it's relative. It's not absolutely real. It appears to be something other than it is.