Seeing Through the Illusion of Thought

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about seeing through the illusion of thought. So in meditation, we look deeply into the nature of thoughts. We allow thoughts to come and go in a compassionate, accepting, and steady awareness without bias, preference or reaction. We see simply observe them as they arise from stillness, unfold and return to stillness.

And we begin to see that thoughts are mental events. They seem to appear from nowhere and when they appear, they're quite ethereal, you can't really touch them or get hold of them. So they're like nothing else in this world in that way. They're real, but we can't actually locate one. You know, and after they unfold, they seem to disappear again into stillness.

And we can also notice that these mental events, these thoughts seem to appear on their own without any effort or conscious participation in, on our part, they just arise. So it's kind of strange to say that you are thinking your thoughts, in the same way it's a bit strange to say your breathing, your lungs. Yes, we can take conscious control of our breathing if we focus on it and we can take conscious control of our thoughts if we focus on it. But most of the time, the mind is just thinking and the lungs are just breathing. It's happening on its own.

So the thoughts are not really ours. They're not personal in nature. We're not really the doer. The thoughts are just happening. And when we see this then all of a sudden, the mind feels lighter, more free, more at ease.

We don't have to take our thoughts so seriously or personally anymore. So even though a thought appears and maybe telling us a certain story, we begin to see that the thought itself is simply a bunch of sounds that move through the mind, kind of like a cloud moves through the sky. So in this way, we kind of see through the illusion of thought. Whereas before we might've got caught up in thinking and kind of taken over by the stories it was telling us. In seeing more deeply, we become liberated from that hypnotic effective thinking and we wake up to a new level of clarity and inner calm.

So we might think that to master the practice of mindfulness is to quiet in the mind. But true mastery isn't about quietening, the mind. It's about seeing the true nature of thoughts clearly and learning to rest at ease in awareness, no matter what arises in the mind. So in today's meditation, let's continue to explore the true nature of thoughts and the freedom that comes when we see them for what they are. So let's now settle in for that practice and as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.