I’ve noticed that what we might call illusion almost always captures our attention more easily than what we might call Truth.
Truth—whatever name we give it—tends to be quiet, still, and unchanged. Illusion, on the other hand, is busy. It moves. It creates drama. It tells stories. And because of that, our attention is naturally pulled toward the activity of the mind rather than the stillness beneath it. Even when we have a sense that we are not the thoughts themselves, but the awareness in which they appear, it’s remarkably easy to get drawn back into the motion.
It’s a bit like watching a movie and forgetting about the screen it’s playing on. Or listening closely to the notes of a piece of music while never noticing the silence that makes those notes possible. We look at stars and planets and are dazzled by their movement, rarely pausing to consider the vast, quiet space that holds them all.
There’s a story in the Gospels where a wealthy man asks Jesus how to find salvation, and Jesus tells him to give away his possessions. I’ve never read that as a rejection of wealth itself. It feels more like an invitation to look at what he was clinging to. Money, property, and possessions are unstable by nature. Coins can melt. Accounts can vanish. Things break, disappear, or are taken. What he was being asked to release wasn’t comfort or security, but the belief that these outer things were where his true value lived.
Most of us, in one way or another, do the same thing with the mind.
When our attention is completely absorbed by thoughts, worries, plans, memories, and fears, it’s as if we’re under a kind of spell. We take the images, roles, and narratives created by the mind as solid and real, and we begin to identify with them. We forget that we are not the characters in the story. We are the awareness in which the story is appearing.
If you’ve ever been lost in a daydream or caught replaying an argument long after it ended, you know this state well. The body is here, but attention is somewhere else entirely. In those moments, the mind’s activity feels more real than the quiet presence underneath it.
Practices like meditation can help bring attention back, not by fighting the mind, but by gently shifting focus away from its content and toward the stillness that’s always been there. Even so, this isn’t something we “solve” once and for all. The pull of the mind is strong, and returning to what’s steady beneath it becomes an ongoing, everyday practice.
Again and again, we notice we’ve been carried away, and again and again, we come back. Not to something new, but to what was never absent.
