Your mind is a biocomputer. It is a powerful entity that allows you to perceive the world. It is the mechanism that you use to see, hear, smell, taste, feel, and think. Whatever your five senses take in is being filtered constantly by the mind and presented to you in the form of an experience. When you are asleep, you are able to see dreams. These dreams are created by your mind and within your mind. The same thing happens even when you are awake. Whatever you perceive is being created within you.
Generally, there is a thick layer of thoughts between the object you are perceiving and your experience of the object within. This layer of thought is what contaminates your reality. Just like how light is split into multiple colors when it passes through a prism, reality is split by thought as it comes into your mind. That is why two people looking at the same thing might have two completely different experiences.
The thicker the layer of thought within you, the higher the distortion and the further away you are from reality. This can be called being unconscious or “asleep.” You are physically awake with your eyes wide open, but the reality you are experiencing is heavily contaminated with your internal thought processes. Basically, you don’t believe what you see; you see what you believe.
Because you are not able to perceive reality directly, and you believe the distorted reality you experience within you, you end up reacting to situations instead of responding to them. Someone insults you and you are immediately angry about it and you start giving it back to them. You are not in control. Your contaminated perception of reality has made you believe things and has forced you to react.
The mind is constantly baiting you with new thoughts. That’s what the mind is: a collection of thoughts bound together by one single root thought, the “I-Thought.” The thought that there is an individual “I” that is separate from the rest of the world. This “I-Thought” can also be called the ego. It is an idea of who you think you are. All thoughts arise from this root thought. Every thought is a bait for you to bite. Once you bite into a bait, meaning you start thinking a thought, you are caught up in an endless loop. The mind is ever-ready to keep providing you with newer and newer thoughts for you to jump into.
The mind is a bait machine. It wants to pull you into the mode of thinking because that is what keeps it alive. And everything in the universe wants to live, your mind included. The more thinking you do, the more the mind lives. It thrives on your energy and attention. And if left unchecked, it can cause serious damage. How many times has your overthinking led you to dark corners of your life? How many times has your thinking gotten the best of you and you were unable to process what exactly is going on? How many times have you had panic attacks that felt like they came out of nowhere? All of this has one root cause: your misunderstanding of how the mind works.
If you are able to stand back and look at the entire mechanism called your mind, you will be able to notice that you are not the mind. You are the observer, the witness, the experiencer. The one that is experiencing and observing the mind just like how you would observe a tree or a dog or even your body. Anything that you can observe cannot be you. The experiencer cannot be the experienced.
The very fact that you are not your mind can help you step back and actually look at all the tricks of the mind. The more you catch the mind thought-baiting you, the more you are able to see that you don’t really have to take it. Even if you have fallen into the trap of thinking, all it takes is one moment of remembrance, one moment of standing back and just looking at your mind going crazy. You don’t have to do anything about it. There is nothing to be done.
Once this detachment starts happening more and more, you realize that the drama of your mind happening within you cannot really affect you. It is just you forgetting that it is a drama and entering it as an actor that causes the trouble. You forget that you are the actor and get identified with the role that you are playing.
Once this is remembered, whatever the drama is, you can step back and look at everything from the audience’s perspective. This very seeing frees you up. The only way for the thinking to continue is if you are not aware of it. Only your unconsciousness can keep fueling the thinking. The moment you bring in the light of your consciousness, the darkness that is your mind disappears.