You can weave various verbal rugs about the matter forever, but it still comes down to just these two availabilities. When not irresistibly engaged with the rest of the brain’s activities in helping protect the organism’s health, thought is left to either sit and look at itself, or chase rainbows. (Colorful attractions without actual substance are the contents of man’s second reality.)
From one angle, the entire creation of the second reality could be viewed as the brain’s consciousness coping with the ever present question: “What to do with these thoughts irrepressibly produced in me, when they are not forcefully engaged in their primary activity?” All of man’s cultural creations can be validly seen as the brain driving off-duty thought into creating its own make-believe world. A world in which to run about and amuse itself as an alternative to sitting still, looking at itself. (An activity that is clearly not acceptable to the near totality of human brains.)
From the few’s advanced perspective this situation could be: let thought look at itself or let it be distracted. (In classic mystical terms: be mindful or be asleep.) Though as it turns out, per the brain’s inherent preference, it is not in practice as much a matter of letting thought do one or the other. If left to its own proclivity, the brain will simply let off-the-clock thought chase after any passing rainbow-distraction in preference to allowing it to be still and look at itself. So pragmatically, it is really a circumstance of having thought look at itself, as opposed to allowing it to do what it finds more agreeable. It is like a free roaming dog randomly chasing passing cars: thought chasing other thoughts. The activity which constitutes man’s non-essential, non- physical, second, cultural reality.
What can be wrong with having a hobby? As long as it is not eventually taken to be something more and its origin forgotten, which is precisely what the brain has generally done, and which is exactly what is behind the few’s desire for a change in the condition of their brain’s consciousness. The disgusting though spirit-raising, pig-in-the-hungry’s-pantry, is that in the attempt to alter the way their brain deals with off-duty thought, they routinely become thoroughly distracted in the pursuit of distractions which purport to be instructions in how NOT to be distracted.
J.