That’s why Zen practitioners use koans to release the grip of the mental apparatus. 

Introducing paradox into the mental apparatus is kind of like downloading a computer virus.  Your computer seizes up for a while, and that gives you a moment in which to shift your attention from the tiny screen and the virtual world it delivers to you non-stop.

You don’t need to kill your computer, it’s a very useful bit of tech.  But you have been mesmerized.  You believe that playing Sim City is real life, and you misidentify the computer as your own intelligence, your own being.  Finding ways to disrupt your mental apparatus can help loosen and soften your firm belief that you are your computer, or mistaking your avatar for the real you, so to speak.

One way to do this is to add as much paradox as you can. The mental apparatus likes to think in terms of black and white, right and wrong, and linear paths between one idea and another.  It likes to judge experiences and people as one thing or another.

Just one little paradox is too expansive for the mental apparatus to contain.  In order to keep it in your awareness, you need to expand in order to hold it.  The mental apparatus does not expand, it always stays the same.  If it encounters something too expansive, it attempts to digest it; to break it down into smaller and smaller components and then sort and sift those into categories.