Thoughts are what define whatever experience we have, both physical and mental. We have labels, categories and associations that build our thinking, and thinking is what gives shape and meaning to all our impressions and at the same time controls and guides our actions and reactions. Thinking is what our personality is made of, it is behind both our feelings and behaviour. From the intimate level of family relations to the global stage of international politics, from our attitude towards our own body to the construction of megacities - they are all regulated and formed by thinking. Past experience and future expectations are present as thoughts. All in all, the spatial and the temporal, the inner and the outer world are what thinking makes them to be.
Therefore, if we want to go to the very root of whatever problem we may have, we have to look at our thinking. As it has been summed up before, it is us who call something a problem and it's not the thing itself that says so. The raw experience without concepts is meaningless and ungraspable. It is meaningless as it has no definition and no relation to anything without names and ideas. It is ungraspable because both past and future exist only in our mind, and this present moment itself is just a theoretical measurement that cannot actually be pinpointed as anything in particular.
Thinking as a type of experience is also meaningless and ungraspable. Thoughts come and thoughts go, if we let them. However, we regularly select certain thoughts as important and substantial, concepts that are presumably relevant for us. This habit of choosing and rejecting is our conditioning, a result of past learning and repetition of similar thought patterns. The older we get the more fixed certain patterns become and they also grow in numbers, that's how we can easily cope with various situations in life, except when something unknown happens. But even in case of an event that is foreign to us we habitually try to rely on past knowledge. Only very rarely, when we are strongly forced to come up with a new perspective, do we reluctantly change our mind. In other words, the personality - a set of habitual thinking patterns - prefers the known and familiar over the unknown; it wants permanence and not change.
The illusion of stability is the basic mistake that makes us feel dissatisfied and powerless whenever we encounter change. And change is all there is. There is not a single moment of life that stays for another moment. Thus the constant struggle to project our habitual thinking on our experience and manipulate both our inner and outer world according to our preferences. In order to be free from this basic tension and existential uncertainty we need to let go of the desire to control everything. Control here means both defining, interpreting and integrating experience, and manipulating, changing and regulating the objects of perception. The wish to control is based on the belief in stability, that there are a fixed person and a fixed object.
To remove this urge to control everything we have to discover for ourselves that the reality created by our thinking is nothing else but our thoughts. Thoughts that are themselves without any meaning or substance. Once it is clearly understood and perceived that thoughts are actually ungraspable it comes naturally that the whole personality and the entire world built of and on nothing substantial. It doesn't mean that nothing exists, it's just that it doesn't exist as we have imagined it. And that makes all the difference between being stuck in habitual thought patterns and being free from the ideas of permanence. Thoughts come, thoughts go. Thoughts build personalities and worlds. It is exactly because thinking is alive and changing that construction and destruction, connecting and disconnecting, that is, life is possible.
Therefore, if we want to go to the very root of whatever problem we may have, we have to look at our thinking. As it has been summed up before, it is us who call something a problem and it's not the thing itself that says so. The raw experience without concepts is meaningless and ungraspable. It is meaningless as it has no definition and no relation to anything without names and ideas. It is ungraspable because both past and future exist only in our mind, and this present moment itself is just a theoretical measurement that cannot actually be pinpointed as anything in particular.
Thinking as a type of experience is also meaningless and ungraspable. Thoughts come and thoughts go, if we let them. However, we regularly select certain thoughts as important and substantial, concepts that are presumably relevant for us. This habit of choosing and rejecting is our conditioning, a result of past learning and repetition of similar thought patterns. The older we get the more fixed certain patterns become and they also grow in numbers, that's how we can easily cope with various situations in life, except when something unknown happens. But even in case of an event that is foreign to us we habitually try to rely on past knowledge. Only very rarely, when we are strongly forced to come up with a new perspective, do we reluctantly change our mind. In other words, the personality - a set of habitual thinking patterns - prefers the known and familiar over the unknown; it wants permanence and not change.
The illusion of stability is the basic mistake that makes us feel dissatisfied and powerless whenever we encounter change. And change is all there is. There is not a single moment of life that stays for another moment. Thus the constant struggle to project our habitual thinking on our experience and manipulate both our inner and outer world according to our preferences. In order to be free from this basic tension and existential uncertainty we need to let go of the desire to control everything. Control here means both defining, interpreting and integrating experience, and manipulating, changing and regulating the objects of perception. The wish to control is based on the belief in stability, that there are a fixed person and a fixed object.
To remove this urge to control everything we have to discover for ourselves that the reality created by our thinking is nothing else but our thoughts. Thoughts that are themselves without any meaning or substance. Once it is clearly understood and perceived that thoughts are actually ungraspable it comes naturally that the whole personality and the entire world built of and on nothing substantial. It doesn't mean that nothing exists, it's just that it doesn't exist as we have imagined it. And that makes all the difference between being stuck in habitual thought patterns and being free from the ideas of permanence. Thoughts come, thoughts go. Thoughts build personalities and worlds. It is exactly because thinking is alive and changing that construction and destruction, connecting and disconnecting, that is, life is possible.
