So the other day I was still lying in the bed after I woke up and I was just thinking about what I have to do that day, and all of a sudden I realized I have all of these negative thoughts of the what if type. You know the regular negative thoughts like, what if my car breaks down and I will be stranded, what if somethin bad happens and so on. I have these thoughts all the time but this time it was different, because I was aware that these thoughts were not mine, they just randomly popped into my mind and the mind automatically accepted, or adopted these thoughts and tried to solve things that might not even happen! I mean our mind is trained to solve problems, because that is what life is about, in life we have to overcome obstacles, solve problems and conquer challenges. We do it all the time, so our mind is trained to do it automatically. But I noticed that not only is this draining my energy, once the negative thought is adopted, but also it has the power to induce negative emotions, because the mind treats the adopted thoughts as if it already happened, as if it is a reality!
It was only morning and I didn't even got out of the bed yet and I was already tired, full of fear and anxiety! Isn't it something? And it got me thinking: How does this even work? Would anything even happen without a thought? I mean we are talking in this thread about emotions right? But would there be any emotion without a thought? So I was still lying in my bed but now I want to get up and I clearly observe that there is a thought about it in my mind and I can see it floating around and I feel like I can freely decide whether I will adopt it, that is I will act upon it, or I can decline it and the thought will just pop out of existence like a bubble and nothing will happen. I wanted to get up so I decided to act on the thought and now I felt that it requires some energy to actually move my body, which means will power. I had to actually make some effort to make my body move. Without willing myself to move, nothing would happen. This was new for me, I never knew that we can actually decide what to do with thoughts in our mind. I always automatically adopted every single thought!
For some reason I started to think about meditation and how it is about just observing thoughts and not acting upon them. I read a lot about it, I know the Cs told us to meditate, but I never understood why, like what is the point. Imagine someone would hand me a tool, let's say a hammer, and told me to use it without explaining anything about it. Well, if I never saw and used hammer before I would just not know what to do with it, how to use it, right? In that instance it would be pretty useless tool. But now I think I understood just how importand meditation is. Some say that it is means to control our mind. I see it more like a tool that is useful in decluttering our mind from the useless thoughts. We can literally decide what to do with a thought, right? So basically we can exercise our free will to boot out those useless, negative thoughts that are literally just cluttering our mind and make clear thinking almost impossible. But of course it is easier said than done.
I noticed that these thoughts have some weight to them. And when I say weight, I mean it in the physical sense, like it being a property of a physical object. I noticed that some thoughts are easy to hold in place while making decision, like you would hold light object in your hand, and you can decide whether you put it here or there or throw it out, but there are some heavy thoughts that can literally force their adoption, like if you cannot just observe the thought from neutral standpoint, almost like holding it above you, then the thought will sink into your mind where it becomes reality. You will basically have no say in what to do with that thought, it will be automatically accepted by the mind and acted upon. It is very similar to trying to lift some heavy object in order to throw it out, but it is so heavy that it will pin you down. In that case you simply cannot throw it out because you cannot lift it. But this is where knowledge comes in handy. If one can realize that what that thought represents is a lie, and really believe it, then the thought can not really make any damage and one can easily dispose of it as if it would lose weight. So regular meditation is almost like lifting weights, the more thoughts you can boot out without them affecting you in any way, the more strong your mind will become and of course the goal is to ultimately be strong enough to boot out even the heaviest thoughts that are most of the time hidden deep inside. The knowledge is simply helping in making the thoughts easier to handle, so both meditation and knowledge intake are very important. We can approach our goal from two opposite ends, meditation helps with accessing and lifting of heavy thoughts and knowledge helps with making thoughts weight less and thus we can handle them easier.
So what about emotions? Imagine yourself in a state where your mind is completely blank without any thought whatsoever. I mean not only it sound like the ultimate meditative state, but also because there are no thoughts, there is nothing that would mess with the flow of cosmic energy! The energy would flow completely free and unrestricted through your body and this would be felt as something positive right? I mean isn't it really e-motion? So is it possible that what we perceive as negative emotion is really a constriction of energy flow and what we feel as positive emotion is expansion of cosmic energy flow? So only thinking positive thoughts (basically lying to oneself) while we have clutter in the basement will not do it. The first order of business is to remove all the clutter from our minds and if we can do that, it is like removing a big heavy rock from our shoulders and finally we can be breathing freely again. This way we can get our full processing power back and also the power of positive emotions.
It was only morning and I didn't even got out of the bed yet and I was already tired, full of fear and anxiety! Isn't it something? And it got me thinking: How does this even work? Would anything even happen without a thought? I mean we are talking in this thread about emotions right? But would there be any emotion without a thought? So I was still lying in my bed but now I want to get up and I clearly observe that there is a thought about it in my mind and I can see it floating around and I feel like I can freely decide whether I will adopt it, that is I will act upon it, or I can decline it and the thought will just pop out of existence like a bubble and nothing will happen. I wanted to get up so I decided to act on the thought and now I felt that it requires some energy to actually move my body, which means will power. I had to actually make some effort to make my body move. Without willing myself to move, nothing would happen. This was new for me, I never knew that we can actually decide what to do with thoughts in our mind. I always automatically adopted every single thought!
For some reason I started to think about meditation and how it is about just observing thoughts and not acting upon them. I read a lot about it, I know the Cs told us to meditate, but I never understood why, like what is the point. Imagine someone would hand me a tool, let's say a hammer, and told me to use it without explaining anything about it. Well, if I never saw and used hammer before I would just not know what to do with it, how to use it, right? In that instance it would be pretty useless tool. But now I think I understood just how importand meditation is. Some say that it is means to control our mind. I see it more like a tool that is useful in decluttering our mind from the useless thoughts. We can literally decide what to do with a thought, right? So basically we can exercise our free will to boot out those useless, negative thoughts that are literally just cluttering our mind and make clear thinking almost impossible. But of course it is easier said than done.
I noticed that these thoughts have some weight to them. And when I say weight, I mean it in the physical sense, like it being a property of a physical object. I noticed that some thoughts are easy to hold in place while making decision, like you would hold light object in your hand, and you can decide whether you put it here or there or throw it out, but there are some heavy thoughts that can literally force their adoption, like if you cannot just observe the thought from neutral standpoint, almost like holding it above you, then the thought will sink into your mind where it becomes reality. You will basically have no say in what to do with that thought, it will be automatically accepted by the mind and acted upon. It is very similar to trying to lift some heavy object in order to throw it out, but it is so heavy that it will pin you down. In that case you simply cannot throw it out because you cannot lift it. But this is where knowledge comes in handy. If one can realize that what that thought represents is a lie, and really believe it, then the thought can not really make any damage and one can easily dispose of it as if it would lose weight. So regular meditation is almost like lifting weights, the more thoughts you can boot out without them affecting you in any way, the more strong your mind will become and of course the goal is to ultimately be strong enough to boot out even the heaviest thoughts that are most of the time hidden deep inside. The knowledge is simply helping in making the thoughts easier to handle, so both meditation and knowledge intake are very important. We can approach our goal from two opposite ends, meditation helps with accessing and lifting of heavy thoughts and knowledge helps with making thoughts weight less and thus we can handle them easier.
So what about emotions? Imagine yourself in a state where your mind is completely blank without any thought whatsoever. I mean not only it sound like the ultimate meditative state, but also because there are no thoughts, there is nothing that would mess with the flow of cosmic energy! The energy would flow completely free and unrestricted through your body and this would be felt as something positive right? I mean isn't it really e-motion? So is it possible that what we perceive as negative emotion is really a constriction of energy flow and what we feel as positive emotion is expansion of cosmic energy flow? So only thinking positive thoughts (basically lying to oneself) while we have clutter in the basement will not do it. The first order of business is to remove all the clutter from our minds and if we can do that, it is like removing a big heavy rock from our shoulders and finally we can be breathing freely again. This way we can get our full processing power back and also the power of positive emotions.
