Thoughts are one kind of hallucination. They may be composed of visual imagery, concepts, or just random bits of language. Thoughts are one of the fundamental things we consider 'personal'. They are present only in our subjective experience, and are inaccessible from the outside.
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Yet we don't author our thoughts - they come into being based on a complex array of causes & conditions; the relative presence/absence of neurotransmitters in the brain in a moment, your cultural background, what you had for lunch, and events millions of years before your birth.
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Thoughts are a particularly powerful hallucination, as they have the ability to completely change the character of our experience in an instant. I may be leaving for work when I look at the time, and a thought immediately arises saying “Crap, I’m gonna miss the bus and be late!”.
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My experience of calmly enjoying the morning weather after a night of rest then quickly transforms into utter chaos. My stress response gets activated. Epinephrine floods my body. As a result, my blood sugar increases. My mood is ruined simply because I believed a thought.
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Thoughts are useful. They allow me to look up the correct bus routes and to understand how to buy a monthly bus pass. However, I don't have to ever *believe* a thought in order to make use of the information it provides.
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Mindfulness of thoughts means paying close attention, in each moment, to the automatic flow of thoughts that the mind generates and how those thoughts trigger inner responses in the form of physical body sensations and emotional reactions.
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Instead of taking thoughts as true representations of reality, we can simply try to see each thought as an object - one that has spontaneously arisen out of the emptiness of mind due to factors beyond our control.
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This allows us to take a step back. We can ask "does this thought contain any useful information?" before we decide to engage with it. The mind's habit is to immediately feel like we *own* the thoughts, and that we're obligated to take them seriously. This habit can be loosened.
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Gradually, the hallucination becomes more transparent. It’s a bit like switching to a lower darkness level on a pair of sunglasses. When wearing sunglasses, the tint is an unavoidable feature, but the darkness can vary. Think of conceptual overlays as the “tint” of the mind.
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It's probably not possible to experience reality with no filter at all (nor would it be desirable, given that we need filters to be functioning humans). But it is possible to have conceptual filters be more transparent, so that they aren't preventing us from seeing clearly.
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When you can see filters as they are, and switch between filters pragmatically without ever being attached to one or another, your mind is much freer to engage with life in a more relaxed way. Many problems cease to be problems, and real problems become easier to solve.
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Replying to @Failed_Buddhist
Very nice summation of Buddhist approach to mindfulness of thought. Take it a step further into mindfulness of society, then ‘society’ is critiqued and becomes transparent. Same with Buddhism itself–as a religion/ideology; critiqued it becomes transparent.
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Replying to @shaunbartone
Thank you, and you are absolutely right - seeing through our own thoughts is the first step. It merely paves the way for mindfulness of society and culture (and indeed Buddhism as an "ism"). That's where large-scale change starts to happen.
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