Separation
A rare but vital occurrence
“I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone also thinking wrongly, and, being human, [I] can’t bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse.” - George Saunders
The toddler in front of me on the plane would not stop wailing. Every attempt at pacification, from the Peppa Pig recording playing on her iPad, to her older sister’s pleas, to her mother’s commands, fell on deaf ears. She simply could not accept what her mother had told her a few minutes ago: that we were in New York.
“WE’RE NOT IN NEW YORK,” she shrieked. “WE’RE ON A PLANE.”
—
Once, in high school, I broke up with my girlfriend on a whim. Well, not exactly a whim—I had what in my mind felt like an excellent justification. I’d asked her to do something with me one weekend, and she replied with something really curt, like, “I can’t.”
From this reply I wove in my mind a remarkably tangled tale. She was clearly done with me; she’d met some college guy, probably a musician, and she was actually going to spend the weekend with him. That was that.
I decided to get ahead of the impending embarrassment by breaking up with her. Ha, take that, I thought. I win.
So I let her know that I was breaking up with her, and she was shocked and hurt and asked me why, and I muttered some nonsense and mentioned the text, and she told me something like, “I had plans with my sister that night. I was actually typing another text to you after that one, but my phone died.”
Oh.
—
I read a meditation cue the other day that sort of broke my brain. It went something like: ‘Mind is just another object that passes through awareness.’
I’m not sure how to use language to articulate why this was so impactful (good thing I’m a human being writing an essay!), but here’s an attempt.
A lot of meditation instruction talks about dispassionately observing thoughts as they come and go. But when I apply that instruction, I find that I’m still using the mind. Like, I’m observing my thoughts with the thing that produces thoughts.
This bit about mind being another object in awareness allowed me to zoom out a level to where my awareness of the activity of the mind was occurring against the backdrop of something more fundamental, more pure—call it body, or consciousness, or Self. The activity of the mind was a singular entity from which I could experientially separate.
The reason I find this important enough to clumsily express is that the rare moment in which I manage to achieve this separation is nothing short of magical. There is a universal reduction of tension, a relaxing into being that’s just lovely. It’s as if I discover that I was wearing a pair of glasses with thick, trifocal lenses made of self-spun narratives. And the glasses are heavy—they cause existence to feel viscous and cumbersome and somehow at the same time dissociative, like I’m walled off from the world, wading through a murky fog of shapeshifting stories. Then I remove the glasses. The wall disappears. The viscosity dissipates. There is, for a moment, no filter between me and my direct experience. My cells respond with gratitude: they let their guard down, wrap themselves in a blanket, cozy up by the fire. It feels right.
—
The mind works in such a way that we become immersed in its commotion without knowing that we’re doing so. Its stories and projections become the fabric of reality. Sometimes this is helpful and necessary; often, it’s an existential pain in the ass that prompts us to do things like break up with someone over a text.
Among all the useless nonsense we learn growing up, nobody mentions that there is a profoundly different way of experiencing the world that is accessible through a perspective shift and a bit of practice. Nobody tells us we have this strange thing called a mind that convinces us that we couldn’t possibly be both on a plane and in New York, and that it’s possible to create some distance from this mind. That we’d be unimaginably better for it.
We would be wise to shout this from the rooftops.
A huge thank you to and for their generous feedback on this piece.
Ha, right! Every American coin should be corrected to say "In mind we trust" if we wanted to be honest about our starting point, the way you've beautifully illustrated here. Yes, shout it from the rooftops my friend. The mind is the toddler screaming, "WE'RE NOT IN A UNIVERSAL MIRACLE, WE'RE IN A SEPARATE HUMAN BODY," not knowing that both are possible at the same time.
Alex, your essay is a mirror, reflecting the shared absurdities and revelations of human existence. The toddler's protest is both hilarious and profound—don’t we all have those moments when our minds scream WE'RE NOT IN NEW YORK stubbornly clinging to a single narrative? It’s a sharp and playful way to show how the mind traps us in its constructs.
Your meditation insight struck a deep chord. That shift from observing thoughts with the mind to realizing the mind itself is just another object in awareness? That’s the kind of paradigm shift that sneaks up on you and changes everything. It reminds me of peeling off a sticker you didn’t know was there and suddenly seeing the glass clearly...
When you describe the physical relief of separation, I felt it viscerally. Isn’t it strange how the simplest truths—that we’re not our thoughts—can feel so liberating, yet so elusive? Do you think this shift becomes easier with practice, or is it one of those endlessly humbling pursuits?
Also, George Saunders as your opening guide is perfect *chef'skiss* a master of finding humor and grace in the human mess. Thanks for shouting this from the rooftops; the world needs more reminders like this one.