From the Forthcoming:
Waking Up to Life!
The Art and Skill of Awakened Attention
One of the most dramatically transformative understandings you might receive is also one of the most difficult to swallow if you have never considered it before. That understanding is this: the mind is not ‘yours’, and many or most thoughts that appear in what you call ‘your’ mind, actually appear in ‘the’ mind, unbidden and unsolicited. Most thoughts simply arise spontaneously, in accordance with your history, conditioning, education, predispositions and tendencies. Simply put, thoughts happen, thinking happens, you don't do the thinking.
Yes, you read right. Thinking happens but you are not the thinker.
Yes, you read right. Thinking happens but you are not the thinker.
The beginning of freedom is the realization that
you are not the thinker.
~ Eckhart Tolle
So rather than replacing negative mental activity or self talk with positive mental activity or self talk, what happens when we recognize or simply notice the mental activity is happening? What happens when we become the noticer or the watcher of the mental activity? Is it possible to see the mental activity, and in that seeing to become a passive bystander, while not buying into the minds chatter?
The jig is up!
I understand that I have become accustomed to listening to that little voice in my head. The mind is what the mind does: it moves. The mind likes to stay busy, it doesn't like to wait, it wants what it wants now, it knows it all, it is a liar, confused and scared.
The mind is especially uncomfortable with uncertainty.
William Keats coined the phrase 'Negative Capability', defined as: when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. There are not many minds that like the sound of that.
The mind says "uncertainties need decisiveness, mysteries should be solved, doubt will fall to proof" all the while irritably reaching after fact and reason. The mind does not like not knowing, period. The mind will even create stories to replace uncertainty.
THE mind.
THE mind is busy, THE mind is overactive, THE mind is distorted, THE mind is not 'mine'.
Whew! That feels a lot better.
One should say, it thinks, just as one says, it rains.
~ Litchenberg
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