David Peat

196 From Certainty to UncertaintyOur thoughts are like a great stage. We people this stage with charactersand endow them with emotions and goals. We forget that theyare no more than the products of our thoughts, that they are smokeand mirrors. Nevertheless we end up treating them as if they were real,autonomous things in the world. This is where our problems arise, notin our “animal instincts” but in the distortions of reason whereby webecome incapable of distinguishing the products of our thought fromthose of real objects or situations in the world—and of course realobjects are also, in a sense, created out of our perceptions. We do not somuch see the object in all its naked reality as we see, in part, what weexpect to see.We spend parts of our lives out of contact with what could perhapsbe called “the real.” We don’t always live in the present moment.We are disconnected from events. At the self-same moment that we areexperiencing something, we may also be standing outside ourselvesobserving our reactions. At a moment of pleasure we may already be inthe future anticipating the next occasion. Being in one place we mayimagine ourselves in another.The brain is exceptionally creative. It is able to summon up dreamsand images to the point where they end up creating a half fantasy worldwhere nothing is really immediate. The fictions of our thought becomerealities—enemies, foreigners, evil powers, economic threats thatliterally threaten to destroy us. And that word “literally” is chosen becausewhat is under threat is the entire theater of our thought, a constructthat has become so real for us. If it were to collapse, then webelieve we too could disappear along with it. In the face of such threatswe must either fight or flee. And so we no longer relate directly topeople, events, and situations around us but focus on the Other thatwe have created in thought. This Other may be a person, or a particulargroup of people. It may also be some perceived threat to our existenceor well-being—violence in the inner cities, environmental damage,and the spread of drugs. It is not that such threats and dangers donot exist in actuality, but that they have been amplified and clothed bythought to the point where they become monsters of the imaginationso that we can no longer distinguish the products of our own thoughtfrom what lies outside in the world.