Imagine you are travelling through life and you make one tiny mistake.
A completely understandable mistake.
You think your thinking is reality.
That’s it.
You look at the world in front of you and think:
Well… there it is. Reality.
My partner is annoying.
My boss is an idiot.
The economy is frightening.
That person doesn’t respect me.
My childhood damaged me.
My future is uncertain.
I’m not good enough.
Tuesday is shit.
Reality.
Case closed.
And of course this sounds reasonable.
Because how else could we experience reality?
Is there another reality?
Isn’t what I see simply… what is?
Well.
No.
And this is where things start getting interesting.
Welcome to the cinema
Imagine sitting in a cinema.
Huge screen.
Dolby Atmos.
Perfect picture.
You are completely absorbed in the movie.
Then, somewhere halfway through, you forget that you are in a cinema.
You start believing the screen is the actual world.
When it rains in the movie, you look for an umbrella.
When the villain appears, you want to call the police.
When the main character gets dumped, you start hating her ex-boyfriend.
And if somebody beside you says:
“Gabriel… it’s a film.”
You say:
“Are you blind?! LOOK AT THE SCREEN!”
That is basically the human condition.
We are looking at the screen of our own experience and assuming that what appears on it is reality itself.
But we never experience reality directly.
We experience a thought-created rendering of reality.
Always.
Most of the time you don’t experience another human being directly.
You experience your thinking about that human being.
You don’t experience your job directly.
You experience your thinking about your job.
You don’t experience your past directly.
That one is especially funny when you really look at it.
Your past isn’t even here.
And yet you can sit on your sofa in Berlin in 2026 and suffer from something that happened in 1997.
That is an astonishing superpower.
No time machine required.
Just Thought.
We are rendering machines
There is a world.
There are people.
There are trees, buildings, dogs, traffic jams, bank accounts, wars, sunsets, WhatsApp messages and people who inexplicably send eight-minute voice messages.
I’m not saying the physical world doesn’t exist.
I’m saying:
You never experience it without Thought.
Something happens.
And instantly, invisibly, beautifully, insanely fast, the human system renders an experience.
Meaning.
Interpretation.
Emotion.
Importance.
Danger.
Beauty.
Insult.
Hope.
Despair.
Love.
Fear.
A complete inner world appears.
And because the rendering is so convincing, we usually don’t see the renderer.
We see the movie and forget the projector.
This is the most fundamental misunderstanding I know.
And at first it can sound like bad news.
“Wait. You mean I’m living in my own thought-created world?”
Yes.
But this is not bad news.
This may be the best news you ever hear.
Because if your experience isn’t being injected into you by the outside world…
then the outside world does not own your inner life.
Read that again.
If I do not feel the world directly, then I cannot be the psychological victim of the world in the way I thought I was.
Other people cannot install feelings inside me.
Situations cannot reach into my body and press the anxiety button.
My boss cannot inject stress through Bluetooth.
My ex cannot remotely access my nervous system.
The weather cannot upload depression.
There is no emotional USB port.
What I feel is my thinking coming alive inside consciousness.
That changes everything.
This does not mean: “Just think positive”
Please.
No.
Absolutely not.
I am not suggesting that when your life is collapsing you stand in front of the mirror saying:
“I am abundant. I am abundant. I am abundant.”
while your house is literally on fire.
This isn’t positive thinking.
It isn’t controlling thought.
It isn’t replacing bad thoughts with fluffy ones.
It is seeing something much simpler and deeper:
Thought is transient.
It moves.
It changes.
It comes.
It goes.
You have already had approximately nine billion thoughts you no longer care about.
Yesterday you were worried about something.
Today you forgot what it was.
Five years ago something felt like the end of the world.
Today you might need ten minutes to remember it.
Thought moves.
And because the world you experience is created through Thought, your experienced world moves too.
That means you are not permanently stuck inside any psychological reality.
Even when it feels like you are.
That is freedom.
The company of thoughts
Sometimes one thought shows up.
Sometimes an entire corporation arrives.
One thought says: “She doesn’t like me.”
Then HR joins: “Nobody really likes you.”
Finance arrives: “This is also why you’ll probably die poor.”
Legal comes in: “We have reviewed the evidence from 2004.”
Marketing says: “Your competitors are doing much better.”
And suddenly you have a multinational organisation operating inside your skull.
A whole company of thoughts.
Board meeting at 3 a.m.
Mandatory attendance.
And because you believe the meeting is about reality, you act accordingly.
You defend yourself.
Attack.
Withdraw.
Control.
Avoid.
Prove.
Please.
Hide.
Fight.
Run.
Not because reality told you to.
Because a thought looked real.
That is such an important distinction.
Most of the stupid things we humans do are not because we are stupid.
We are simply caught inside a very convincing thought-created world.
And when the thought looks real enough, our behaviour makes perfect sense from inside that world.
What if there is something before Thought?
Now we get to the part I love.
Because beneath all that thinking…
what is there?
Before the story.
Before the judgement.
Before the identity.
Before:
“I am this kind of person.”
“I can’t do that.”
“This always happens to me.”
“People are dangerous.”
“Life is hard.”
What is there before all of that?
Something quieter.
Something formless.
Something very hard to describe because we have been trained to understand things we can touch.
Tables.
Phones.
Cars.
Buildings.
Products.
Numbers.
Qualifications.
Concrete.
We love concrete.
Show me the spreadsheet!
Show me the evidence!
Show me the thing!
And then someone comes along and says:
“The most important part of you might be invisible.”
Fantastic.
Very convenient.
How do you explain something formless to a culture obsessed with form?
I don’t know if you can.
Not completely.
I can only point.
Sydney Banks called it Mind.
You could call it life.
Essence.
Spirit.
God.
Universal intelligence.
The breath of life.
The thing that grows your fingernails while you’re busy arguing on LinkedIn.
I don’t really care what name you give it.
The name is not the thing.
The important part is that beneath the noise there seems to be something incredibly sane.
Something whole.
Something peaceful.
Something that does not need to constantly discuss your performance.
Your distilled nugget
I sometimes think of it as the distilled version of us.
Your core.
Before all the decoration.
Before your CV.
Before your nationality.
Before your achievements.
Before your mistakes.
Before the personality you have spent decades constructing and defending.
There is a more fundamental you.
And when the noise settles, even slightly, this part becomes visible.
Not visible like a chair.
Felt.
Known.
You become quieter.
Clearer.
Kinder.
You see more.
You need less defending.
You don’t have to force wisdom.
Wisdom arrives.
You don’t have to manufacture peace.
Peace was underneath the noise.
You don’t have to create love.
You notice that the walls around it were made of thinking.
And life starts becoming lighter.
Not because your circumstances suddenly become perfect.
But because you are no longer carrying a psychological interpretation of your circumstances every second of the day and calling it reality.
The life orgasm
I sometimes call this feeling the life orgasm.
And before you get too excited:
I’m not talking about the peak.
I mean that moment after the tension drops.
That long:
Aaaaaahhhhh.
The whole system settles.
Your shoulders come down.
Your breathing changes.
Nothing needs fixing for a second.
You are not defending yourself from life.
You are just here.
Alive.
There is a lovely feeling underneath all the mental activity.
Sydney Banks often spoke about looking for the feeling.
And the more I see this, the more I understand what that points to.
There is a feeling of being alive that we are all searching for.
Peace.
Freedom.
Love.
Connection.
Wholeness.
Home.
And then we make the tiny mistake of searching for it outside ourselves.
We think:
Maybe it is in the next relationship.
The next job.
The next house.
The next amount of money.
The next achievement.
The next holiday.
The next follower.
The next person finally understanding that I was right all along.
Then I’ll feel it.
But if feeling is generated inside us, we are searching in the wrong direction.
The thing we are trying to get from life is already built into life.
It is already inside.
The kingdom of heaven is within.
And yes, if you prefer:
the queendom too.
I’m not going to fight over the branding.
The point is:
It’s here.
Heaven is not hiding
That peaceful place is not hidden somewhere in Tibet.
You do not have to climb a mountain.
You do not need seventeen certificates.
You do not need to meditate for 40 years until a beam of light shoots out of your forehead.
It is underneath the thinking you are currently taking seriously.
Under the overthinking.
Under the doubt.
Under the fear.
Under the anxiety.
Under the self-improvement project.
Under the endless internal discussion about whether you are enough.
There is already life.
Wonder.
Possibility.
Wisdom.
Love.
And a surprising amount of humour.
Because once you start seeing the mechanism, some of the things your mind does become hilarious.
“Oh! Here we go again. Apparently everybody hates me because someone used a full stop in a text message.”
Fascinating.
You can still get lost
Understanding this does not mean you float through life permanently enlightened.
I certainly don’t.
You will still get caught.
Of course.
You will believe some ridiculous thought at 8:15 in the morning and by 8:17 you’ll have mentally emigrated, divorced everyone, sold your company and decided humanity was a failed experiment.
That’s okay.
The difference is:
You begin to know what is happening.
You know you are in the cinema.
You may still cry during the film.
You may still scream.
You may still get completely absorbed.
But somewhere inside you there is the understanding:
This is a movie.
And that changes the entire game.
Because eventually the scene changes.
The thought changes.
The feeling changes.
The world changes.
Not necessarily the physical world.
Your world.
The only one you can actually experience.
What if we reversed the ratio?
Most of us seem to live predominantly inside the thought-created world and occasionally fall into essence.
A moment in nature.
Playing with a child.
Laughing uncontrollably.
Making love.
Creating something.
Walking the dog.
Standing under the shower.
Suddenly…
nothing is missing.
We are just alive.
Then five minutes later:
“Oh shit. The mortgage.”
Back into the movie.
But what if we could reverse the ratio?
What if essence the new normal…
and the thought-created drama became the place we occasionally visit?
Not by controlling our minds.
Not by fighting thoughts.
Not by becoming spiritual superheroes.
Simply through realizing how the system works.
Then maybe life becomes less about escaping fear and more about living.
Less about protecting ourselves and more about creating.
Less about proving who we are and more about discovering what is possible.
Less war.
More curiosity.
Less defence.
More love.
Less tightening.
More exhaling.
Less surviving.
More life orgasm.
Maybe this is the freedom we have been looking for
What if the thing creating most of our psychological misery is not the world itself…
but innocently mistaking our thinking about the world for the world?
What if “I’m not good enough” is not a fact?
What if “I can’t handle this” is not a fact?
What if “my future is dangerous” is not a fact?
What if “that person makes me feel this way” is not a fact?
What if they are creations?
Temporary worlds.
Beautifully rendered.
Emotionally convincing.
Sometimes terrifying.
But still made of Thought.
Then something enormous opens up.
Because I no longer have to fix every movie playing on my screen.
I can begin to understand the projector.
And beneath every movie, every story, every fear, every identity, every bit of mental noise…
there is still you.
Alive.
Whole.
Connected to something far bigger than the small personal world inside your head.
A place of wisdom.
A place of peace.
A place of love.
A place of possibility.
The place we come from.
The place we spend our lives searching for.
And maybe the funniest part is:
We never actually left.