We only feel our own thinking
We only feel our thinking
Great mystics agree that the world is an illusion. Syd Bank and his followers simply summarize: We only feel our thinking and nothing else.
Check it yourself
You can check this by simply sit and close your eye for 10 minutes. Many thoughts will come to you. One minute you may feel happy and peaceful thoughts. Then you will feel boring and anxious thought. You will feel many things. But the reality is that you just sit and close your eyes for 10 minutes. Clearly, you only feel your thought, not your reality.
Knowing the truth, what should I do?
Now you agree with the truth that you only feel what you think. A natural question would arrive what the benefit of knowing this spiritual truth is?
Trying to have a good thought?
If we feel what we think, one implication of this truth is trying to have positive thinking to feel happy. Although as obvious as it sounds, it does not work this way.
Thoughts are not yours and you cannot control it
Control your thinking is not working. Try this simple experiment: don’t think about cats for a few minutes. Can you do that? No, you can’t. Not only you cannot think about cats, try not thinking about cats make you think about it more. The more you try, the more you feel stuck. So trying to control your though does work.
Are we hopeless?
So far we have two facts. We feel what we think and thinking is not under our control. Are we hopeless then? If we are just the total of our thinking, we can only hope for luck that we will have happy thoughts and happy thought would bring us happiness.
We are not our thinkings
The final spiritual truth and arguably the most important one is that you are not your thinking, you are aware of it. You are free from your thinking.
Human problem
The analogy that I found useful is you are watching a series. When you are so identified with the protagonist. When the protagonist is under siege, you are so frightened. You think hard about how to help the protagonist. You sweated. You suffered. Then the movie ends and the protagonist might die or survive. You remain.
What to do or not to do?
Now suppose, you watched a movie knowing that you are not a character in the movie. How would you watch a movie? Knowing that you only experience the movie and you cannot change the movie because it is not real. You just watch it and you are not going to interfere with the movie and you let it be.
Practice
Last night, I try this practice. Sit and close your eyes. Allow any thought to be. Any dream to come. Any drama to come and go. But you remain.
Reference Book
The Inside-Out Revolution by Michael Neill
True Meditation by Adyashanti
