As she began to live her adult life she understood how the collection of thoughts, which composes a person, is also called the “mind.” Whenever she spoke, she referred to “I,” but gradually she came to discover that she was only referring to her “collection,” only associating the “collection” with who she was according to social custom.
She realized that if she could witness this dynamic process, that she must actually be something else, besides her so-called mind. While working at jobs and doing grown-up things, she noticed that if she did not witness things closely, she could get stuck in ideas about who she was.
Sometimes she felt sad, whenever she identified with a thought, like being unlucky in a monopoly game as a little girl. And sometimes if she identified with a thought about having something, she would be happy. She began to be keenly aware of moods and how they were affected by wanting things to be a certain way.
Eventually she made the connection between memories and present-day experiences: she realized that she valued experiences in direct proportion to how much she trusted the mind (a mind that, she was in the habit of reminding herself, was just a collection of thoughts and memories). What was called an experience was essentially just another thought: a thought that was in turn composed by other thoughts. She noticed that words and thoughts worked very similarly.
And because any one thought that held together all the other thoughts was believed to be who a person was, like one’s name, the whole world of people doing this, in one way or another, seemed layered with contradictory thoughts most of the time. She liked the word “sur-real” to describe these weird layers of personality. It was no wonder that the mind appeared to her to be just like a house of mirrors. Awareness became limited by the thoughts that were taken to be real, by an imaginary person, who was just a collection of thoughts itself. Wow!
She also realized that a person’s body was innocent. It bore the burden of all the thoughts that people took to be true, especially about their place in the world (which was all imaginary although they did not know it). She would look into the faces of other grown-ups and see so much sorrow and grief, fear and longing, deep discouragement. Their bodies would reveal the thinking they had been doing all of their lives.
After awhile, she began to see the attitudes and concepts such people were holding in their bodies, on their faces. Nothing was hidden. Her own body was always changing also. She used to reflect on this. The body that she remembered was not the body she had now. So, the body she remembered was just a thought, a memory-thought binding a collection of prior thoughts: she had taken this strange see-through body of thoughts as the basis of her own I-person.
But the time had come to give that habit up forever.
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