Have you ever realized that everything that happens in your mind - every thought, feeling, sensation, everything you are aware of - is actually happening only in your private internal world? Your thoughts appear only to you and are not listened to by anyone else. There is a physical world here on earth, but billions of different internal worlds. We are all in our separate theaters, watching completely different shows, yet we act as if we were in the same audience, watching the same event that we call life.

Why is it important to contemplate this truth? Meditating on this is liberating, because it implies that what we personally experience in our heads is not real. We are aware of our thoughts, so in this sense they are real. Still, our thoughts do not exist outside of our awareness. There is no other place where the thought that appears to you right now is actually happening. Unlike how we imagine it, our thoughts are not solid, like trees or rocks that exist outside of us in a tangible way. Certainly I have never seen a thought walking down the street for me. Where, how and if thoughts exist within the body is unclear. That thoughts appear to our awareness, on a giant projection screen (of which we are the public), is all we know.

What makes a thought real is the attention we bring to it. We transform a thought into a solid object by focusing on it and relating as if it were an event that is happening in the world somewhere. Usually in the world of the person or thing we are thinking about. We connect the two - the thought and the object on which the thought is based - when in reality the two are not actually connected. Our thinking does not influence the object of that thought unless we believe in it. How liberating it is to know that if we don't deal with a thought, we respond, we change it, we identify with it and everything else literally ceases to exist. If we let a thought be nothing, then it is what it will be ... nothing.

Here are some things we do without realizing it:

• You immediately go back to reread the email a moment after sending it.

• You would rather try to make an unlikely parking place than stress yourself to find a convenient parking place.

• While taking a shower, make a cup with your hands, collect as much water as possible and drop it on the ground.

• When you make a long phone call, you start walking, back and forth. Sometimes it travels kilometers.

• Repeat a discussion several times in your mind, in case you ever need to use it.

• You must always find the perfect series to watch while you eat what you have prepared.

• Smile at the dog you meet as you walk, completely ignoring its owner.

• Very often you seem to feel your phone vibrate in your pocket, even when the vibration is turned off.

• Start the music in random play, then skip each song until you find the one you wanted to hear from the beginning.

• Stop someone talking.