Executive Function wrote:
If I were constantly to live in the now then I would have developed absolutely no ability to communicate nor make practical improvements to my life. I like my freedom too much to constantly *just* live in the now. There’s a place in the now for consideration of narrower and more limited thoughts, such as planning for the future, and considering what can be learned from the past.

You are by no means unique in this respect, but probably the biggest problem facing any student of this subject is a woeful failure to understand the simplest elements of it, along with a corresponding complete conviction that they do, confidently trotting out trite and meaningless platitudes, which leads to stifling and blind restrictions such as the one gripping you in the above paragraph.

When you “plan for the future”, when you “consider what can be learned from the past”, when you “make practical improvements to [your] life”, all these things are happening in the now. It is perfectly possible to do all these things while “living in the now”. One can “live in the now” just as easily by paying attention to what is happening inside your head, right now, as one can by paying attention to what is happening outside your head, right now, and to suggest otherwise demonstrates that you don’t understand what “living in the now” means, although as I said you’re in good company on that point, including the individual you initially responded to.

The important element is to pay attention to something real. The pictures that your thoughts generate are not “real” in the sense that they are representations of the world, not the world themselves, but the thoughts themselves are real, and the process of having thoughts is itself real. When you think, there is a real thought, whether or not you believe there to be something real that is having that thought or whether that thought is existing by itself. To imagine that one can only “live in the now” whilst in some mystical non-thinking trance is just that, an imagination, and a belief in it – in other words, a failure to pay attention to what is real, and to instead pay attention to what is unreal – will make it all but impossible for you to achieve success in this subject.

You don’t need to banish thoughts altogether – you only need to cease believing in the reality of the world they create. “Living in the now” is perfectly compatible with paying attention to a real thought about the future, and it’s perfectly compatible with acting on that thought. It’s only when you start mistaking the thought world – the imaginary world – for the real world that you run into problems, because then you’re not paying attention to reality. It’s initially a lot easier to pay attention to reality while in a non-thinking state than it is while in a thinking state, but that’s only a question of practice.

Executive Function wrote:
I suspect that such practises become part of an internal narrative over time, becoming part of the delusion that they’re ‘getting somewhere’, and actually I wonder what the fuss is about?

This is possibly the largest part of your problem – you merely “suspect”, but you try to convince yourself that you know. This is why you talk about someone “who has cultivated thier awareness through practise to such an extent that they never forget thier thoughts are simply representations of the world” as if it’s some kind of weird and lofty attainment, and try to project this incessant “internal narrative” that you suffer from onto other people.

Being aware of – on a day-to-day basis – the unreality of your thoughts is like learning that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, or the tooth fairy. Once the illusion has been completely dissipated, then it’s gone, permanently. Once you stop believing in the tooth fairy, you don’t need some kind of permanent effort or “internal narrative” to prevent yourself from falling back into such a belief; it just never occurs to you to believe in that silliness anymore.

Executive Function wrote:
It’s certainly helpful to recall that reality is not the imaginary construct our brains have concocted – periodically and when we can, but if we cannot hold onto that perception given the linear nature of the conscious rational mind, and that’s just the reality, then surely it is of more consequence what you actually do to capitalise on the perception when it comes around?

See? There you go with those suspicions of yours again. You can’t sensibly sit around and pontificate upon what is “surely…of more consequence” until you understand what you’re talking about.

Let me put it to you again simply. If you believe in the reality of the thought world, then what you “perceive” is imaginary. It is just foolish for you to start talking about “capitalising on the perception” when the issue at hand is whether you perceive what’s out there or whether you perceive a load of misleading bullshit in your mind. It is the very perception that is the question, here. Is responding appropriately to a misleading illusion of no consequential difference to responding appropriately to reality? No, there is a very significant difference.

It is not simply a question of whether you recognise an illusion for an illusion, and apply that label to it; it’s a question of being able to distinguish how the thought world is unreal on a day-to-day basis. The thought world is materially different to the real one, and if you don’t perceive the unreality of thoughts then you will not be able to detect where the two are differing, and the result will be that you will make horrible decisions on the basis of faulty data, and the imaginary world will diverge even more starkly from the real one.

Next time you take a flight on an airplane, you want to hope that your pilots do not share your views about what is “surely of more consequence”. There are incidents on record where crashes have occurred because the fuel gauges indicated full tanks when they were really almost empty, and a quick visual inspection of the tanks – which was omitted – would have very quickly brought to light the fact that what they actually had there was faulty fuel gauges. It only takes one such incident to convince you – if you survive – once and for all that whether or not you believe in certain “representations” is indeed very much “of consequence”, and such a person will not in future need telling twice the importance of being able to determine whether certain “representations” are accurate. A complete disbelief in the accuracy of cheap fuel gauges is not some impossibly lofty mystical attainment, and a complete disbelief in the reality of the thought world isn’t, either, for the exact same reason.

When I say that “the thought world is unreal”, it is not the mere fact that it is unreal which is important; it is the fact that the information those representations convey to you is often wrong. And not “wrong” is some abstract, philosophical “what is ‘reality’ anyway?” sense, but “wrong” in a very immediate, practical and sometimes life-threatening sense. Believing in the reality of the thought world is not a mere question of semantics; it’s equivalent to trusting your life to a notoriously error-prone gauge, and then pretending to be surprised when it breaks.

Executive Function wrote:
What most people regard as the reality outside of our heads is just a sensory delusion actually. I’m not saying that the outside world doesn’t exist or is unreal, but on a sensory level we build up an approximate representation of the world and store it in our brains. We infer reality through logical deduction, in a transitory manner, while desperately avoiding what this demonstrates about identity.

You’re getting confused about the terminology, here. You’re taking one valid concept, but discussing a completely different one as if they were the same thing. The “approximate representation of the world” being discussed here is not the one where the mind represents tables as being solid when in “reality” they are comprised almost entirely of space, or the one which represents oranges as actually being orange instead of being conscious that the perception of colour is merely a result of light interacting with the visual sensory equipment and is not inherent to the object itself; the “approximate representation” under discussion is the one that tells you – to take a random example – that the universe is constructed in such a way that responding to one “illusion” is no different to responding to any other “illusion”, so it is of “no consequence” whether or not you take the time to learn how to actually find out what’s happening before you respond to it.

Once more, there is a very big and very practical difference between paying attention to what is actually there – regardless of how “real” that may or may not be, and regardless of how far you want to go into epistemological philosophical discussions about what the nature of the world outside your head actually might be – and paying attention to a complete and fanciful fabrication, especially if you proudly buy into the latter as your own super-special “personal reality tunnel”.