How Mindfulness Allows Us to Escape the Addiction to Thought

Let’s try an experiment – I want you to put your attention on physical sensation in your left hand. Notice anything? Are you suddenly aware of a world of sensation that you didn’t notice before?

We are all used to the idea of having five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch). Buddhists add ‘thinking’ to this list to make a total of six senses. When we develop strong concentration, through practices such as meditation, we can begin to notice that thought behaves in a similar way to sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch – a thought pops into awareness, remains for a time, and then disappears. It therefore begins to make sense that thought be considered just another one of the senses or ways that we experience reality.

If you put your attention on any of the six senses (just like we did in the experiment above when we focused on touch) – that sense will fill your awareness and become prominent. For instance, if you were to overly focus your attention on the sense of smell, this sense of smell would play a much larger part in your perception of reality.

The exact same happens with thought – we are constantly focusing on thought so we begin to live in a thought-centric universe. This is a problem because in order for thought to be able to keep our attention, it needs to differentiate itself from the rest of reality – it does this by creating an ego identity that is at odds with reality (e.g. the thought, ‘it shouldn’t be like this’ or ‘you need this to be happy’). The ego can only exist as a conflict with reality – when there is no conflict, there is only reality, and no ego is required

Once thought becomes the prominent way in which we experience reality, we are already hooked. We forget that we are awareness that observes all of the senses. Instead, we overly identify with one sense that can only maintain its prominent role by continuously finding fault with reality.