Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need for true ideas. There aren’t any” (Nisargadatta)

Thought tends to run us (ala David Bohm), but it’s such a convincing hallucination that we’re the ones choosing what we think. But usually, we’re just repeating fragments of ideas that have come to us from others, from one-sided, patriotically-distorted historical education, Youtube, echoing chat groups, books, unconscious habits of response in parents and teachers that presume certain “facts” about life (absorbing these philosophies unconsciously). Etc.

How are we supposed to have an idea of our own in this rubble-strewn flood of information? How can we pick and choose what is right or wrong when our basis of decision making also comes from this chaotic flood?

Ironically, we’re not lucid until our thoughts are recognized as a cultural dream into which we were born. We awaken by realizing we’re asleep.

The irony is that real individuality only happens when I realize that thought has carried me away, that beliefs ran me from one blind conviction to another, like cordyceps (the zombie-ant fungus).

In fact, there are many examples of entomopathogenic fungi “running” insects and mammals like zombies. (According to research from the University of Texas, “an estimated 1.5 million fungal species are entomopathogenic”). For example, Toxoplasma gondii require the bodies of cats and mice to complete their life cycle. The parasite urges the mouse to seek cats, to run directly into them, so that they may be killed and ingested, where the next stage of their life cycle can be completed in the bodies of cats.

I don’t mean this as dramatic hyperbole, but as a realistic parallel. A similar effect occurs with what could be called “immaterial parasites.” So-called “earworms” (songs stuck in our heads) are harmless examples of thoughts running us. But there are far more serious examples. We think it’s odd that a mouse would be forced to run towards predators, doing the bidding of a fungal parasite, but what are we doing when we run towards guns and shoot people dead with whom we’ve never had an argument? Aren’t we also zombies of a sort when we do the bidding of unstoppable “earworms” of nationalistic fervor or ideas of honor and duty, which makes us blind and insensitive to our own bloody hypocrisies?

In fact, thought itself tends to run us on automatic pilot from morning till night. Ideas can be seen in this light as a kind of parasite. Ideas themselves are not fully alive. They require a host to carry out their life cycle and pass their prejudices and implicit assumptions on to the next generation.

How we think is often (at present) not our choice, but a consequence of where we grew up, what the stream of information was like that formed the vast extent of our quirky, trauma-bent personalities. We do the bidding of the ideas that were implanted in us. We are sleepwalkers if not zombies.

And although this is a disturbing point of view, it’s also fascinating and strangely promising! Promising in the sense that the immaterial parasite of thought is easily irradiated by our real intelligence, our real Being, which exceeds thought, which is not rooted in words, ideas, self-images or any mediated form of knowledge. Intelligence reads between the lines of thought, can penetrate its surfaces and expose the hidden biases that have caused the body/brain to operate in ways that drive it towards self-destruction.

Perhaps, then, language, thought or any mediated form of knowledge is not by itself parasitic, but operates AS such so long as we conflate these ideas with reality or Truth itself. We shrink ourselves to the size of our ideas. So long as we are “true believers”, we’re willing to carry out the murderous program of the ideal. So long as an essential confusion between map and territory remains, we become trapped in our own maps, unable to handle ideas metaphorically, like an artist.

In metaphors, we’re no longer stuck in the peculiar shapes of our beliefs, but able to see through them. If we’re stuck in what we believe then there’s no freedom to move past the definitions of ourselves that the thoughts have established. We can’t wake from the daydream.

Thought becomes transparent every time that essential confusion is faced. Then thought, idea, word, symbol, who we think we are, they all show themselves to be a material clay that an immaterial intelligence uses to perform a dance of meaning. In any dance performance, there’s no “final interpretation of the dance” that explains everything. Every performance reveals a different nuance that will never be repeated.

In this way an alphabet of 26 letters can bend and twist into forms that are infinitely unique. But only when we’re not embedded in that alphabet, pinned to the definitions of ourselves.

That’s why I say that I myself (the idea of myself) is a kind of clay figurine, a shape-shifter (made of infinitely selective strands of memory). Like a child playing dolls, there needs to be a realization that something else more real than this idea of me exists. Otherwise we are controlled and trapped within the artifice of “myself”. We have to remain unknown and uncertain to be free of parasitism.

But this is not the uncertainty of a vague, blank nothingness. It’s the uncertainty of nuance held lightly, of a chrysalis unfolding ever new forms of itself — a performance of living and dying and living and dying in material shapes of language, biology and ideas, without conclusion.