Dethroning the Dreamer
Who’s really callin’ the shots?
What are thoughts?
I don’t mean where they’re from, how they are made, or what they’re made of.
I don’t care about that, and neither should you.
A fish is in no position to explain the ocean, the bubbles obscure the view; yet nothing knows the ocean better than a fish.
Like this, the human animal is in no position to be answering these questions, not when the method of investigation involves use of the thing in question.
What I’m interested in is the thoughts themselves. The bubbles.
So, what are thoughts?
Thoughts are things. Fluid objects, filled with nothing but air.
“But Alex, I can’t touch my thoughts.”
Well actually, hypothetical questioner, you can touch your thoughts. You do it every night. Dreams are thoughts too. Hence the term daydream used in reference to a series of distracting thoughts.
To further the point, if you were to eat 5 grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms right now it wouldn’t take more than an hour for physical sensations and mental imagery to start bleeding into one another. It’s very possible to literally touch the contents of one’s own mind.
“But Alex, I know that dreams and hallucinations aren’t real.”
What you have, hypothetical questioner, is a belief about dreams and hallucinations being less real than reality. Try convincing the version of yourself that’s trapped in a night terror of this belief… Dreams are as real as thoughts, and certainly more tangible. An experience is just an experience before a thought dialogue shows up and labels it as “real” or “unreal”.
“Okay, but this thought dialogue is just my inner voice, and it serves me as a good tool for distinguishing between real and unreal, good and bad, dangerous and safe.”
Let me try and explain something to you that might feel obvious after it’s been said. This inner voice is not your inner voice, it’s an inner voice; and one of many. Every time you think your thoughts, they are new thoughts. The content of the thought(s) might appear the same as another’s, but the thought itself is fresh. The inner voice from when you were 13 years old is not the same voice in your head right now. You can’t step in the same river twice.
“Yeah, I suppose this could be true, but that still doesn’t erase the fact that this voice is helpful for navigating life.”
Thoughts can be helpful for navigating life, you’re right. They can also be helpful for destroying it. This is the problem. A broken clock is right twice a day, and a baseball has no business telling a monkey how to be a monkey.
“You lost me.”
We just established that thoughts are subjective objects. 99% of the human population is taking advice from objects. Yes, they are mental objects from your brain, but they have nothing to do with you. They are inner reflections of the outer world. You are simply an organism with a brain capable of generating hyper-realistic mental imagery.
“This all seems so… basic. So much so that it feels untrue.”
This is the other problem; quite prevalent among meditators: we tend to use our thoughts to judge whether or not our thoughts should be true or not. A talking baseball also has no business telling a monkey what is real or unreal. A monkey has no business telling another monkey how to be a monkey, and I have no business telling you how to be human.
“So what should I do if I’m still taking orders from baseballs?”
Stop taking orders from baseballs. If a monkey threw a baseball at your face right now how would you respond? Would you wait for a thought to say “look out!” and then dodge the ball, or would you dodge the ball first and then listen to a thought say “holy shit, that was close”?
The latter right?
Do nothing, the body has it all figured out.
Trust it.
The truth is what you knew before you learned anything; before thoughts started talking in the first place.
Thanks for reading!
Stay tuned for more blasphemy.
