In my inner work, I have seen evidence that is very clear that most of my/our experience of our lives and the world is lived in a muddled ignorance of reality. Both of the insights I'm sharing here were, and are testable by direct experience.

In working on a painful breakup with a woman I chose a situation in which I was in her apartment and asked her to dance. She declined.

Looking back on that moment, I saw that I was attached to images of our mutual attraction in the past and images of her in a possible future dancing with me. Images are imagination. They are not reality. This bears some emphasis, I think.

Whether or not I can prove our past happened, it makes no difference to my experience of suffering in that moment. My consciousness was dominated by fantasy and reminiscence: illusion. And this illusion is a seductive drama, not seductive in a sexual sense but appealing to our endless drive for distraction and illusion. I think Voltaire said, "the first of all pleasures is illusion".

Those images of her were motivating and actuating what I said, felt, thought and did. The reality of the woman in front of me was mere background, occasionally stepping in to move the drama in my head one way or the other.

My spiritual teacher has a quote that says, "no two people have ever met". So, if the woman in front of me is experiencing her images and thoughts and projecting them on me, the quote is certainly experientially true.


The second insight actually came from a radio show I listened to as a kid in which someone was supposedly channeling some spirit of some sort named simply John. What John said was an easy question, which was whether or not we experience a voice in our head when we're not speaking or listening to someone or something. Easy right? I don't know anyone who'd say 'no'.

His second question was, "is that voice you?" Whoever was in the studio (probably a talk show host) answered a tentative 'yes' and without thinking too much I easily agreed. "NO!", said John, "who is listening?" I then thought something like, 'whoa, that cool'.

So, neither the internal words or the voice is who I am. When I believe I am thinking the thought, the thought that "I'm doing it" is actually another thought which has me not the other way around.

Taking these two accessible insights together, it's plain to me that I don't know her in that moment and I don't even know me! Re-cognizing this, brings me into the present. I'm able to really see her and I'm not absorbed into the stories that run amuk. I'm calm, patient, grateful, compassionate, whole......and released.