Think about Thinking or be its Slave

What happens in your mind matters. You can't go wrong starting with a quote from the Matrix.

The Secret to Getting What You Really Want:

Part Two

Think about Thinking or be its Slave

Take this guy here for instance. Talk about being a slave to thinking. Am I any different, are you? I remember the first time I tried to meditate --- yikes. 

Is silence really so fearful? 

What strikes me over and over again, the more I practice watching my own mind, is how often my brain produces utter rubbish and nonsense. I’m talking about the gutter-level trash that serves no good purpose and yet appears with such regularity. Unkind and untrue gossip about myself and others, valueless observations based on some simmering cesspool of negativity buried somewhere in the stinky bits of my brain. I am not alone; alas, the vast majority of humanity suffers from similar monkey mind poo flinging.

The sad thing is that for every mean, angry, selfish, confused, fearful, or poisonous thought that sullies my mind, or simmers beneath the surface of my thoughts, lurking and creeping about in my darkness, there are radiant, loving, insightful alternatives pushed out of the careening train car of my brain before they have a chance to be born. The baby never even made it into the bathwater. Within us all, there lays such brilliance waiting to illuminate our lives if we but clean the windows of our mind and toss out the clutter from our souls.

I am talking about thoughts.

For every thought worth thinking, how many more serve no good purpose and simply distract us from the greatness we really are; or worse convince us we are not that all ready. Let’s emancipate our minds and shake off the chains of mindlessness and habit. We rob ourselves, stripping away our true nature, dampening our light, and cutting off our power. In so doing we create suffering. Frankly, that just bites.

I am talking about thoughts.

I propose we construct a metaphor for how it all works. We will take back our power. We will reclaim who we really are. We’ll call this metaphor the Lifecycle of a Thought.

The Lifecycle of a Thought

Something happens and a stream of sensation enters our brain through our senses. The brain receives this sense data and processes it. As a result of this processing, a thought arises, like a fish jumping out of the water. 

One of two things happens next: either we scoop the fish right out of the air by catching it in the net of our attention; or unattended, the fish flops back into the ocean. 

When a thought first pops up and we notice it appearing, we can choose to attend to it--- 

                          ---or not. 

                                           We can --- STOP. 

Thoughts feed on attention, they cannibalize our energy, highjack our emotions, and steal away our time. They pervert our perceptions and distort our reality --- but only if we feed them attention. If we do not pay a thought our attention, if we do not give it any mind --- it cannot abide and it dissipates.

Ah, but what if we get sucked into the thought and it captures our attention? Let’s pretend that a thought has a growth threshold. Let’s say that a new thought starts at level 1 and every bit of attention it can wrestle away from you brings it closer and closer to the power-up that boosts the thought to level 2. The thought isn’t done, not if it can help it! It will suck away more and more juice from your soul and power-up again and again: level 3 and level 4 and level 5 and so on.

Every level the thought gains   drains away more of your life and sucks away more of your energy ---stealing it away and gobbling it down. It’s not just a thought anymore. It has a life of its own, sticky and clinging, lurking and creeping, plotting to steal away even more of your time, perception and attention. If a thought gets enough of your attention, it becomes a belief and beliefs sink into the bedrock of your consciousness, swollen from a mere fish to a super-shark ready at any time to leap out of the ocean and take a bite out of your boat.

Not every thought is a villain in the melodrama of our life, but a great many of them are. The vast majority are based upon distorted and inaccurate interpretations. Once a thought takes root by feeding on our attention, it creates a set of filters. These filters begin to privilege other thoughts that support it and deny any evidence to the contrary. The thought must see itself as right to survive. 

Ask anyone familiar with current brain science about how accurate our memories actually are. 

The reasons our memories are so appallingly off kilter is precisely due to these mental filters that bias and distort our perceptions. Every thought has its own inborn filter set. The greater the sum total of attention a thought has received, the greater the power of its filters to distort and bend our perception of everything unfolding around us.  Remember the third Law of Attraction? Whatever you think about, surrounds you. Not only do these thoughts and their filters distort our perceptions, but they broadcast the energy of themselves and attract more of that back into your experience.

These old and powerful thoughts set traps to attract more attention, a shark hurtling itself up from the depths at the slightest association or provocation. Then, whatever is happening around us is no longer in our present; it’s been ripped down into the our dark depths, locked in the jaws of one of our own inner super-sharks. 

The TV reality show of our lives has changed channels and we seldom even know it. The thought is distorting our perception of the present by superimposing its own agenda and interpretations on everything that happens.

Once a thought gobbles down enough attention to live on in your subconscious mind, waiting for its chance to highjack your attention and swallow more of you down, it does not change. It cannot change. Other thoughts might arise that differ and they will fight for their fill of you as well, like Parana lusting to strip the meat off your bones. 

The more attention they have hoarded for themselves the heavier they become, sinking, rooting, burrowing deeper and deeper into your subconscious. Every time they can grab an association or similarity with anything happening in the present, they burst out of the depths and clamp down on your consciousness. They cannot be changed. They can only be denied attention. 

Every time you catch yourself thinking such a thought and cut off the juice, the thought weakens a little. The more attention it has stored away, the more difficult it is to shrivel it up and starve it into extinction. But it can be done. In fact, we can argue that your peace of mind and personal progress depend upon it.

There is more elaboration possible, but we’ll save that for another time. Meanwhile, let me sum up our story.

Thoughts feed on attention. Attention is your most powerful and precious resource. Thoughts that can’t feed, bleed back into nothingness. Thoughts that capture your attention gain a life of their own and then compete for more attention. They filter and distort your perceptions to prove themselves right and to prolong their existence by sucking up more and more of your precious attention. 

Thoughts that capture enough attention become beliefs and, for better or worse, beliefs tend to run the show. Worse, thoughts are noise and noise drowns out the radiance of the divine that is our true birthright. No matter how bloated and fat our old thoughts have become, we can refuse to feed them further until they dry up and wither away.

The solution is frustratingly simple to say and frightfully difficult to do, in the beginning at least. The solution is to watch your own mind. Learn to witness what happens there. Practice awareness. It takes practice, lots of practice. Yet the capacity is fully built in, we just have to start using it. You know when you are thinking, a part of you always knows.

We tend to get lost in our thoughts; but a part of us always knows. So just determine to watch yourself thinking and every time you become aware of your thoughts, congratulate yourself. Some teachers suggest naming the type of thought you catch yourself having. “Ah,” you can say to yourself, “That was a planning thought.” Or a memory, or an imagination, or an evaluation of self, others or circumstance. 

This practice can help you become a master of meta-thinking, and break the chains of slavery binding you to the dark parts of your own mind. Meta-thinking means thinking about thinking; but it really means watching it all happen in your mind, just being aware, just being conscious, just being awake.

It’s worth the effort, as I’ve suggested at length across all my posts.

If our lives are anything less than uproarishly vibrant, unendingly powerful, unshakably peaceful, unspeakably loving, then we can be assured that the lack is utterly and completely due to a thought that has invaded the realm of our true self and devastated the countryside of our awareness. We are prisoners of war in our own minds. Freedom is a watched thought away. I say it one more time: emancipation and true freedom is only a watched thought away.

Now that we've spent a few lovely moments considering how thoughts operate, how like a parasite, they are born, feed off of you, grow stronger at your expense, live forever unless you refuse to feed them, and are hard to starve away --- we need to talk about how to support the positive thoughts that we want to promote. How can we strengthen the insights that flow in from your highest wisdom places? How can we eliminate negative and distorting filters to promote our greater truth? And how does it all tie back into the four  core concepts of the Law of Attraction? Stay tuned for part three. So until next time. . .

With love and aloha,

Holman

Part 1: The 4 Things You have to Know to Get What You Desire
Part 3: The Key to Getting Everything You Desire