Become a thought magician
Empower yourself through your objects of consciousness
The New Mindscape #A2–2
The power of your thoughts
Objects of consciousness aren’t just things you look at. They are constantly sending energies.
Remember a time that someone you know (let’s say his name is Jack), did something unjust or unfair to you, making you angry.
Each time you think of him, a negative emotional energy is released into your mind.
Some objects of consciousness are negatively charged, others are positively charged.
But it’s more than that. Objects of consciousness aren’t just charged positively or negatively. Their charges have different qualities.
Some will make you excited, others sad, others joyful, others stressed, others intrigued.
But think about it a bit more.
The thought of Jack causes you to have negative energies of anger, and leads you to act to plan revenge.
Those energies affect you in a very real way.
Do they come directly from Jack? No.
They come from your thought of Jack.
So the thought is real, and powerful.
But what is a thought? It’s almost nothing. It’s like a cloud that comes and goes, that aggregates and dissipates.
That negative energy actually comes from you.
Jack has certain qualities. Aspects of his personality, his appearance, the things you remember about him… all of these have their own “flavour” or “energy” in your mind. When the thought of Jack arose in your mind, with those energies, it triggered your negative emotional energy to rise, and to attach itself to the thought of Jack. Now the thought of Jack is the container of that energy.
And, filled with that negative energy, the thought of Jack controls you.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called this the mechanism of magic [1]:
we create objects of consciousness, we transfer mental energy onto them, and then they control us.
Do our thoughts really control us?
Yes.
Think again.
Our pure consciousness is empty and perfectly clear [2].
But the purpose of consciousness is to have an object — something to be conscious of.
The moment consciousness touches on something, becoming conscious of it, it becomes filled up by that thing. It becomes captured by the thing it’s thinking about.
That’s why it’s hard to imagine what consciousness is. Most of the time, we’re not conscious of our thinking, because our thoughts have captured our consciousness.
And not only have our thoughts captured our consciousness, we have empowered them with positive or negative energy.
This is what Sartre called “magic”.
Playing in your mindscape
So what should you do about it?
Here is the spiritual solution. Learn how to:
1. Play with your thoughts
2. Play with the magic
3. Play with the energy.
At first, I was going to say “master your thoughts, master the magic, master the energy”.
That’s logical, because the idea is for you not to be controlled by your thoughts: you should be the master.
But to “master” sounds like you want to be in full control. But you can never be in full control.
On the other hand, when you’re good at playing a game, it means you know the players, you know the ball, you know the space, you know the moves. A ball comes to you, you can catch it and throw it back. You don’t control the ball and it doesn’t control you. You’re separate from it, but you’re one with it too.
And it’s fun to play a game! When you get good at it, it becomes easy, and you’re happy!
First, learn to play with your thoughts.
You need to detach your consciousness from its objects.
Already, by thinking through these ideas, you’ve become aware of the distinction between consciousness and objects of consciousness. This awareness is the beginning of that detachment. This is called meta-cognition [3]. With this detachment, you will have better knowledge of your thoughts, and better control over them. But this takes practice. This is an important spiritual practice.
Second, you need to play with the magic.
What do I mean?
The magic is not a bad thing, and it can’t be avoided. You’re not a meditator who isolates himself in a mountain cave for years, and tries to completely empty his mind. You will always have ideas and objects of consciousness in your mind, and they will have magical power over you. The question, then, is how to nurture a mindscape full of objects of consciousness that have positive power for you.
So you need to learn the magic.
Third, you need to learn to play with the energies.
Let’s go back to the example of Jack. The idea of Jack gives you negative energies.
An obvious solution, is to avoid thinking of negative things, and to think of positive things.
This is true. That’s an important solution.
But in the example of Jack, you empowered the idea of Jack with negative energies.
The source of the negative energies isn’t only Jack, it’s also you.
The thought of what Jack did might trigger all kinds of negative associations in your mind — remembering other things about Jack that upset you, remembering other times when other people did something like Jack, or other negative emotions that had been buried in some deep layers of your mindscape.
Imagine your mindscape containing a pond of water. What Jack did was a stone that fell into the pond, and hit the bottom of the pond. When the stone hit the bottom, all kinds of mud, silt, rotten sticks, and gooey algae are stirred up. The pond becomes muddy and putrid.
But what if, at the bottom of the clear water, is pure white sand?
When the stone hits the bottom, it simply settles on the sand. The water remains clear, and it returns to stillness after a few minutes.
If your mind is full of negative energies, it is more likely to give negative energies to all the thoughts that pass through it.
If your mind is full of positive energies, it is more likely to give positive energies to all of its objects of consciousness.
This means that, depending on your own mental state, you might give negative or positive energies to the idea of Jack.
How could the idea of Jack have positive energies for you? Think about that for awhile.
So you can give positive or negative power to your thoughts.
Think about that.
You want to give yourself positive power, don’t you?
And don’t you want to give positive power to others?
People around you feel the positive or negative power of your thoughts.
You influence them.
They feel that power, and they’ll be drawn to you or stay away from you.
You’d better learn about your own power.
In the future posts in The New Mindscape, you’ll be learning more about these things:
1. Play with your thoughts
2. Play with the magic
3. Play with the energy.
[1] Daniel O’Shiel, Sartre and Magic. Being, Emotion and Philosophy. Bloomberg, 2020.
[2] Robert K. C. Forman. The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 1997.
K. Ramakrishna Rao (2005) Perception, Cognition and Consciousness in Classical Hindu Psychology. Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, 2005, pp. 3–30(28)
RAMAMURTHI, B. (1995), The fourth state of consciousness: The Thuriya Avastha. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 49: 107–110. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1440-1819.1995.tb01871.x
B. Alan Wallace (2005), Vacuum states of consciousness: a Tibetan Buddhist view. In Buddhist Thought and Applied Psychological Research. Routledge, 2005.
Smith, D.W. Nibbanic (or Pure) Consciousness and Beyond. Philosophia 39, 475–491 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9312-y
[3] Frith, C. D. (2023). Consciousness, (meta)cognition, and culture. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(8), 1711–1723. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218231164502
Hussain, D. (2015). Meta-cognition in mindfulness: A conceptual analysis. Psychological Thought, 8(2), 132–141. https://doi.org/10.5964/psyct.v8i2.139
The New Mindscape series is a practical exploration of spirituality rooted in the critical perspectives of anthropology and sociology.
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This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
