Try this:
Hold your hands up, palms facing each other, one beside each ear. Feel the heat radiating from your head, and get a sense of how small the space is between your hands. It’s not much bigger than a basketball.
Every single thing you’ve ever experienced, every sour memory, every embarrassment, every triumph, every great fear and every great hope, is confined within the space between your hands. All conceptions or visions of your past and future are right there floating above your neck, and they cannot be found anywhere else. They have no weight of their own, no permanence. They can take no form other than that of a fleeting thought.
Rather than experiences, thoughts are more akin to a sudden noise: they arise with a frightful clatter, and are just as suddenly gone, leaving no trace. Unfortunately, the human mind has some inefficiencies. The mind doesn’t automatically make a distinction between experiences and thoughts about experiences, regardless of whether those experiences are remembered, anticipated, or imagined.
If they are mistaken for the actual experiences they represent, the person thinking them can react as such, with the same physical and emotional distress they might have if they were actually experiencing them. These physical responses can trigger other thoughts, and the subsequent torrent of ‘noise’ can take on the appearance of a whole lifetime of regrets and worries. They are still insubstantial thoughts, but the physical and emotional reactions they trigger are concrete and real. Simply recognizing thoughts as the phantom ruses they are can halt this process before it happens.
