You Are Not Your Thoughts

We go through life thinking. We think constantly, and we can’t turn it off. We think even harder as we get caught up in the digital world, a world that is made up of imaginary beeps and boops but is somehow magically real.

But are we what we think? I think I’m my occupation, bank account number, relationship status, fan of my local sports team, but what really defines me?

I listened to a brilliant podcast yesterday, really it was a talk that was recorded probably in the 1960s, by one of my heros, Ram Dass.

Ram Dass was originally an LSD pioneer in the early 60s, working with other famous Acid people like Timothy Leary to conduct mind-expansion experiments and bringing consciousness awakening throughout the western world by dosing everybody they could.

However, for Ram Dass, the expansion only went so far. He realized that the LSD mind expansion state of higher consciousness was a temporary, fleeting view into the true state of higher consciousness, and it wasn’t enough for him to need to keep taking all the time LSD to get there, he needed to live in that higher state permanently.

He went to India and studied under a Guru named the Maharishi for years, where he learned to achieve that higher state through meditation and yoga, and now he lives in that enlightened state of consciousness full-time.

In this podcast he laid out a concept that was brilliantly simple, but hard to think about, because it’s about thinking. The concept that we are not actually our thoughts.

We create a world with our thoughts, we need to ‘think things into existence’ in order for them to exist in our minds, and ultimately we paint a picture of the world through the ‘words’ of our thoughts. At least that is how the Western thinking mind typically works, or at least how my mind works. This actually creates a separation from the true world, or ‘the universe’ as I like to call it.

Now when you look back at evolution, we didn’t always have thoughts. We can look at our animal cousins and see that they clearly don’t have the same capacity to think, to imagine, and to create a world of their choosing that we do. And we were just like them not that long ago, and if fact, we still are just like them, except that we can think. Thinking is our super power.

So what drives animals to behave, and to make their animal decisions? They feel, they trust their senses and their gut emotional feelings and act on them. They simply exist and trust the universe that the feelings they are experiencing through their bodies are completely correct.

But what drives us to behave our certain human ways? We behave based on our thoughts that we created ourselves, which are separate from the universal feelings that we feel in our gut emotions. We actually go as far as to distrust our gut feelings a lot of the time, which we don’t realize are universal signals on how to act. These gut feelings are what tells the cheetah to pounce, the deer to run, the bird to fly north in the summer and south in the winter. How can we ignore that in ourselves?

Well we don’t have to. Through mindfulness, meditation, physical exercise, moments of experiencing the ‘flow state’ we can have that deep connection with the universe, where all emotional feelings in our gut are correct and to be trusted.

But it takes practice, to know that you aren’t just the product of what you think, that you aren’t the world created from your thoughts, takes a lot of patience and energy, and is hard. We are conditioned to be our thoughts after years of training in our western educations and in our careers. You need to meditate, to seek that flow state that comes only from the silence of the thought-voice and the whispers in the silence of the universe. It’s up to you to figure out how to do that, what preferred method of meditation that works only for you, and you probably already know internally what that is, just try not to think about it, but feel it in your gut.

This new digital world doesn’t make it any easier. I find myself getting lost in my thoughts online, and lately, even plotting and scheming about how to better post on Steemit a lot of the time. By thinking about my Steemit posts too much, I actually make them worse, because that takes me out of the ‘flow state’ of writing, which is the only time I actually write well. If I’m thinking about it too much, it’s shit.

So I invite you not to get wrapped up in your thoughts today, but to slow your mind and try to listen to what the universe is telling you in your gut, in your emotions, and in your feelings. Enter into a meditative flow state, whether that be from meditation, knitting, cooking, surfing, hiking, whatever you need, and listen to what the universe tells you, because that is truer than your thoughts.

Personally, I am still a prisoner of my thoughts, but I can see a way out now. I will need to devote my energy and patience to achieve the higher state of awareness that I am eternally seeking but incredibly am distracted from by my thoughts.