Welcome to the rat race of the mind.
“Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel … like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind!”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/emmahiggs/2020/03/windmills-of-your-mind-the-tyranny-of-thought/
FYI: The Tyranny of the Mind that I refer to here is located in the psychological realm. Keep in mind there are other realms of tyranny (social, cultural, political, educational, religious) that are constantly oppressing us through conditioning, a form of brainwashing.
We must learn to go beyond thought to awareness
Anything expressed is not real… it is nothing but a perception, a concept conjured up in our minds, then formulated with words that are nothing but signs and symbols that can only point to reality.
Our reality is simply a “perception” or an interpretation of the concept or image that our mind creates.
Awareness is beyond thought and comes from stillness. This is where truth lies.
Thought is made up of words and words are nothing more than signs and symbols that point to reality or truth. Words are labels, containers, and hence limitations.
Truth is limitless, boundless, beyond containment by words or thought.
Thought comes from a place of busyness and noise; resulting in worry and fear, regret and discontent. Thought comes from past memories.
Attention comes from a center of silence, presence, stillness, awareness, consciousness within the present moment; resulting in gratitude, contentment, and peace. (see “Thoughts on Thought”)
Truth (reality) is too big to fit in my head, too big to fit in a book.
But nothing is too big to fit in my heart…
Anything that comes from thought must be held suspect. In other words, don't trust anything you think. Because thought is an automatic, reflexive process that comes in response to stimulation, drama, chaos, and confusion of life. As we experience life, thought has a tendency to take over and take charge by telling us what is really going on. Why does thought need to do that. Thought is originally meant as a survival mechanism to solve problems, to keep us out of trouble, or to keep us alive rather than a victim or some sort of prey. So thought is constantly trying to solve problems, which we really need when there are problems to be solved. But when there are no immediate or urgent problems and we just want to relax, stare at a wall, and unwind, thought continually keeps solving problems even if there are none to solve. Check it out. Sit quietly and pay attention to your thoughts. Notice them. Don’t encourage or discourage them. Just observe them. What do you notice? What are they doing? When a thought arises, count the thoughts that are about the past, the ones about the future, and the ones that are fully present in the here and now. You’ll be surprised how many are totally focused on the past or the future.
- Thought is constantly chattering about something. So often we’re not even sure what about or why. My theory is that in a world that is mostly safe and secure, thought tends toward boredom because there are very few urgent or life threatening problems for thought to be occupied with.
- If there are problems that need to be addressed, thought will immediately be doing its duty and working on solving them, knowing it is a matter of survival.
- If there are no problems, thought is looking for problems to solve. So instead of paying attention to the present moment, here and now, where we all live, thought is digging into the past and into the future, trying to figure out what needs to be done.
- From the past, thought is finding or creating regrets and then trying to fix them or solve them.
- From the future, thought is creating worries and fears that might become a problem, then pre-solving those problems.
- In doing so in the past or future, thought is actually creating problems that do not exist so that it has something to solve; trying to make itself useful.
- All the while we are missing here and now, the present moment is really all any of us have. And yet we miss it, due to thought hijacking control of our experiences.
In the same way that our lives can become a reflection of our monkey mind, so also our lives can reflect boredom from lack of busyness just as thought becomes bored from a lack of problems in our present day life of ease. Even though they are not real, the gods of comfort, security, and certainty feed into this vicious cycle of meaninglessness.
“We modern humans face entirely different day-to-day challenges, but our brains are hardwired to protect us from sabre-tooth tigers. In today’s world we are more likely to be harmed by our own stress response than by any external threat, but our prehistoric brains simply don’t know any better.
“So our minds are producing a constant stream of thoughts (potentially 3,000 per hour), and our Palaeolithic programming causes us to naturally filter out the positive ones in favour of the negative.
“It’s no wonder we get so stressed out.
“I am particularly prone to negative, obsessive thinking, and in the past this has led to debilitating depression and anxiety. I know as well as anyone just how convincing a thought can be, and how easy it is to become trapped in a downward, destructive spiral of negative thinking.
“I also know the profound sense of freedom that can come when I remember that my thoughts do not represent reality.
“It sounds so obvious, but learning to mistrust your own mind takes some serious practice.
“All the wisdom, strategies and techniques I use to keep myself mentally healthy and happy are founded upon these simple but profound realisations:
“My thoughts are just thoughts. They don’t represent reality.
“My mind will naturally focus on the negative, which means I can’t trust my thoughts to be objective.
“Just because a thought enters my mind doesn’t mean I need to pay it attention.
“I have to remind myself of these every single day. But often that brief reminder is all it takes to bring me out of a downward thought-spiral and back to reality.”
Windmills of Your Mind: The Tyranny of Thought
But remember, there is something beyond thought. It is awareness. Another
way to express it is presence, being fully present, fully alive in each and every moment, here and now.
Whenever we face the stories that thought creates, our fears, worries, regrets, failings, shame, poor self image, dramas, and all sorts of stories in our head, we must learn to face those thoughts with full awareness. This unveils the incoherence of thought and gives us a clear view of what is, of reality.
From a quantum physicist:
"We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive.... You don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one who controls each one of us."
(David Bohm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddngc3nhs_I)
“Bohm raises doubts as to whether any form of thought can apprehend what he refers to as the 'unlimited'. As the very nature of thought is to select limited abstractions from the world, it can never really approach the ‘ground of our being’ – that which is unlimited. Yet at the same time, human beings have an intrinsic need to understand and relate to the ‘cosmic dimension’ of existence. To address this apparent disjuncture in our experience, Bohm proposes that attention, unlike thought, is potentially unrestricted, and therefore capable of apprehending the subtle nature of the ‘unlimited’.” (Lee Nichol in the foreword of David Bohm's book, On Dialogue)
For more:
The Limitations of Thought (David Bohm)
And
Thoughts on Thought in Living with Open Hands
“We modern humans face entirely different day-to-day challenges, but our brains are hardwired to protect us from sabre-tooth tigers. In today’s world we are more likely to be harmed by our own stress response than by any external threat, but our prehistoric brains simply don’t know any better.
“So our minds are producing a constant stream of thoughts (potentially 3,000 per hour), and our Palaeolithic programming causes us to naturally filter out the positive ones in favour of the negative.
“It’s no wonder we get so stressed out.
“I am particularly prone to negative, obsessive thinking, and in the past this has led to debilitating depression and anxiety. I know as well as anyone just how convincing a thought can be, and how easy it is to become trapped in a downward, destructive spiral of negative thinking.
“I also know the profound sense of freedom that can come when I remember that my thoughts do not represent reality.
“It sounds so obvious, but learning to mistrust your own mind takes some serious practice.
“All the wisdom, strategies and techniques I use to keep myself mentally healthy and happy are founded upon these simple but profound realisations:
“My thoughts are just thoughts. They don’t represent reality.
“My mind will naturally focus on the negative, which means I can’t trust my thoughts to be objective.
“Just because a thought enters my mind doesn’t mean I need to pay it attention.
“I have to remind myself of these every single day. But often that brief reminder is all it takes to bring me out of a downward thought-spiral and back to reality.”
Windmills of Your Mind: The Tyranny of Thought
But remember, there is something beyond thought. It is awareness. Another
Whenever we face the stories that thought creates, our fears, worries, regrets, failings, shame, poor self image, dramas, and all sorts of stories in our head, we must learn to face those thoughts with full awareness. This unveils the incoherence of thought and gives us a clear view of what is, of reality.
“A mind that listens with complete attention will never look for a result because it is constantly unfolding; like a river, it is always in movement. Such a mind is totally unconscious of its own activity, in the sense that there is no perpetuation of a self, of a “me,” which is seeking to achieve an end.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life: Daily Meditations With Krishnamurti
“Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.”
(Jiddu Krishnamurti)
From a quantum physicist:
"We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive.... You don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one who controls each one of us."
(David Bohm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddngc3nhs_I)
“Bohm raises doubts as to whether any form of thought can apprehend what he refers to as the 'unlimited'. As the very nature of thought is to select limited abstractions from the world, it can never really approach the ‘ground of our being’ – that which is unlimited. Yet at the same time, human beings have an intrinsic need to understand and relate to the ‘cosmic dimension’ of existence. To address this apparent disjuncture in our experience, Bohm proposes that attention, unlike thought, is potentially unrestricted, and therefore capable of apprehending the subtle nature of the ‘unlimited’.” (Lee Nichol in the foreword of David Bohm's book, On Dialogue)
For more:
The Limitations of Thought (David Bohm)
And
Thoughts on Thought in Living with Open Hands
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