The supreme trickiness is in suddenly realizing, (and initially the realization falls on a man like a grinning Steinway out of the sky), that not everything your thoughts think about is important to you. We will start off slow and work the tempo up; that not everything your thoughts think about has any bearing whatever on the day to day life you live, that not everything your thoughts think about is actually of interest to you.
This simple, unconditional, species-wide impacting fact goes completely unnoted by ordinary men. No matter their intelligence, education, sophistication, wealth, power, fame, man’s recorded history of himself and his thinking is, on this matter – silent. Yet there is its reality, right out in the open, in yours and everyone else’s head, a clear and distinct division between two types of thoughts that your thoughts think about; thoughts that have actual significance to your life. (Which are without exception, thoughts about things that have a physical reality), and thoughts about things that exist only in the realm of thoughts, and have no actual pertinence to your life, (other than that which your thoughts say they have…which is Sousa lauding march music).
If this matter had a physical counterpart, it would be so ludicrous as to be ludicrous. It would be that at every meal you ate both actual food and imaginary food, and constantly complained that the latter gave you distress. (Does even ludicrous do the scene justice?), but this is precisely the situation in men’s thoughts, a clear division. Some of what they think about is significant to their lives and relevant to physical reality, and some of what their thoughts think about are things their thoughts made up entirely that have no more significance to their lives than whatever their thoughts tell them they do, (which in no way alters the hard fact of their non-tangible condition).
Consciousness being the relative free-wheeler that it is, it certainly enjoys fantastic mental romps; day dreams of being famous, rich, super talented, better looking, on other planets – you name it – thoughts can think about it, (since they were who named it to start with). Not realizing this simple distinction is what keeps a man from a direct seeing of what life is about. It makes his life more physically comfortable, but in turn disturbs him mentally. That is how it is, unless you are able to somehow trick your thoughts into seeing this division of two entirely different types of thoughts going on in them. (Which since they are them, accounts for the trickiness of the undertaking).
J.