“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”

― G.K. Chesterton

The Wizard’s Reflection

The Cross of Thought

The ability to think is a potentially mixed blessing and must be tended so as not to build its own prison. Sadly, our cultures have cultivated our minds to be locked into entrainment with mistaking thoughts as not only inherently accurate but also that thoughts belong to the thinker. “Our thoughts are not our own” is the sobering beginning of a path of reconciling the absence of something we have been taught as our birthright.

To recognize there is no thought and no thinker, but only thinking, is a lofty suggestion but a point of clarity that some will come to through time. In the interim, we can see how our thoughts lead us astray. When we begin to mistake life for our mental descriptions of life, we fall prey to the shadow of storytelling, the arts of manipulation at their best. When our thoughts create problems, simply by how we think about things, we must don a deep conviction for self-honesty that carries us outside the cage of being right and into the freedom and limitless responsibility of not knowing.

Suggested Divination Meanings

In what ways do I habitually think about things?

When challenged, what mental reactions do I have that serve to increase the challenge?

What assumptions am I making about this situation?

What habits of thought undermine my ability to cultivate a thriving life?

How does the situation appear when I stop describing it to myself?

Do I act on thoughts before reflecting on whether they are helpful?

Do I let the descriptions of others sway me from my highest knowing?

Do I seek to manipulate situations in which I feel manipulated?

From where do thoughts arise, and where do they go when they vanish?

Can I ask a question of myself and answer it without thought?