Staying stuck or moving on

Recognizing thought as thought

Through every experience, you can either prolong the illusion of self, or allow the truth of what you are to come to the fore.

Throughout our lives we oscillate between the poles of awareness and unconsciousness, love and fear.

For most of us, unconsciousness wins the day, with brief interludes of awareness sprinkled in between.

This leads to - let's just be honest - a fairly sucky existence. It's particularly tragic given the vast opportunity for joy available through the simple recognition of our true nature.

Luckily, we don't have to know anything we don't already know to resolve this. We don't have to see through the illusion to dispel it. We can just stop sustaining it and let it fizzle away on its own.

How?

More experiencing, less thinking.

This puts thought in its place as just one feature in a broader landscape of experience.

And when I say "broader awareness" I'm not talking about some refined spiritual experience where you fuse with the universe or whatever.

I'm just talking about being highly in tune with the experience you're having now, whatever that might involve. It's not possible to do that if you're obsessively attached to thoughts.

Obsessive thought about self perpetuates the illusion of self. The illusion of self IS obsessive thought about self.

Counterintuitively, the solution doesn’t involve halting or even necessarily slowing down thoughts. As humans, we can’t realistically expect not to be thinking all the time.

It's more about reclassifying our understanding of thought from “unquestioned arbiter of reality” to “something that’s happening in my experience.”

This automatically reconfigures our relationship to thought in ways that, to make an understatement, fixes a surprising number of kinks in our life.