Have you ever heard yourself say, “What in the name of heaven was that all about?” and you were asking yourself what you had just done? Or along the same lines, “What on earth was I thinking?” when it became clear you hadn’t been thinking at all! Then there’s always, “How could I have been so stupid? So blind?” Or — you fill in the blanks.

It’s more than clear there are many times when we act out behaviors that, while seeming right to us at the time, are later found to be all wrong for us and everyone else unfortunate enough to have been caught up in our misguided choices. But how do such blunders take place, knowing that no one would consciously choose to defeat himself?

The simple answer is that we don’t see what’s actually before us. We are temporarily blinded, but not in the sense of having no vision. Our momentary blindness is due to our own conditioned nature as it supplies us with its view of reality; one that we mistakenly accept as being ours; an error that can only be corrected by becoming more and more aware of the actual nature of our own internal workings. To see where we have been deceived — after the fall — is one thing. But learning to see how we’re being fooled — right in the act of it — brings an end to both the fool and the fall brought on by his foolishness.

Guy Finley writes the "Letting Go" blog on Beliefnet.