We suffer more in imagination than in reality
Seneca the Younger
The underlying imagination (image) is that I exist. And that these ‘imaginations’ are making ‘me’ suffer. Is the suffering the resistance to them? The desire, effort to change them? To change ‘what is’?
What happens when the thought (imagination) is simply observed? What becomes of the ‘suffering’?
What happens when anything is “simply observed”? I, the observer, don’t know and cannot know until/if I is simply observed.
The simple awareness that the thought containing the potential ‘suffering’ has ‘entered the building’ and intelligence says that if it is resisted it will create some kind of suffering, distress, is enough to block any resistance (escape) from it.
When it is simply observed, then there is just the observation.
When there is the thought and the observation of the thought (or the thing) - then this is a more complex mish mash of partial bits and pieces.