I want to share the time in my life I experienced this for myself: as a much younger man obsessed with epistemology I went to India and spent three months in a Buddhist monastery open Ladakh. This included 5 days living in a cave meditating in impermanence. I did so by observing one thing for an hour at a time - a mountain top, a tree branch, a rock. I wanted my sense impressions of that “thing” change over the course of that time. Once, I focused on a drop of water dripping down the side of a small waterfall. After about half an hour, something bizarre happened. I no longer saw the drop “falling”, I perceived three separate still frames, like in a movie reel, of a drop big, middle and low. I realized I was the one stitched those frames together into a “drop falling.” But the action was an illusion created by my mind.

This wisdom has stayed with me forever. And yet—if I look out the window and see that it’s raining, I still take an umbrella.