“What is a thought?” is one of the most important questions you can do. You are using thoughts everyday but you don’t know what they actually are. The nature of thought is illusory. The difference between knowing and not knowing what a thought is is the difference between living in a self-constructed mental prison in which you suffer all your negative emotions and living in a free and self-actualized life. You need a direct awareness of what a thought is, not just explanations. You cannot escape this problem by thinking. Thoughts are illusory but they are real, they are as real as your body. The problem with them is that they are chameleons; you attribute a certain importance and depth that is not real at all. Images are sneaky; even though they represent reality, you think that they are reality itself, mistaking the map with the territory. You are not aware of what thoughts and images really are. The photograph is not the thing depicted. The food photograph analogy. In books, you create the story with your mind from black and white symbols. Language is arbitrary sounds and you create meaning from that sounds. Language is made of symbols and what symbols are are representations of something, but not the thing itself. SYMBOLS ARE NOT REALITY ITSELF AND THEY ARE TOTALLY ARBITRARY; This makes you unconscious since thoughts are arbitrary symbols that acquire meaning over time. And what the human brain does is creating weird and crafty representations of reality that you start to believe are true when in fact are just thoughts. You can get depressed, happy or angry depending on the meaning you attribute to certain situations. Thoughts are arbitrary, thus meaning is an illusion (everything included). Recognize that breaking free from your mind requires that you become aware of what meaning is and its illusory nature. YOU NEED TO GAIN MINDFULNESS OVER YOUR THOUGHTS. If you can master this, you will be less reactive and less stressed by them. There cannot be any suffering without meaning; almost all of your suffering is caused by meaning, and meaning is illusory. A problem is a meaning! Flattening the Illusion: You need to make the distinction between what reality is and your interpretation of it (separate the map from the territory). The trick is to flatten the illusion with your thoughts. You need to develop enough mindfulness in order to not react to your thoughts. The key question is “What is this, literally?”. A thought is real as a sensation in your mind, not as the actual thing. If you don’t apply mindfulness you will be living in a reality constructed by thoughts and not reality as it really is. How to practice this? Commit to flatten 50 illusions in the next week and write it down. Describe the content and then what it really is.