Thoughts on thinking...

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

ARISTOTLE

Thoughts are just what they say on the tin. They do not mean anything, they are not based in any reality and they are certainly not predictions of the future or true representations of the past. They are just thoughts about things, stories we tell ourselves. They are like a running commentary, a non-stop mental chatter that fills our days in such a habitual way that we do not even notice we are doing it. So, where's the harm in that? Well none, if like Aristotle you can entertain the thought and then let it go. But for the vast majority of us, we treat our thoughts as fact rather than fiction and moreover, identify ourselves with our thoughts.

Eckhart Tolle is the author of a rather 'mind-bending' book called The Power of Now. He believes that thinking has become a disease as it has become completely out of balance. He says "Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal".

So what does this have to do with anxiety? Well, quite alot actually, as it is the power of our thoughts and our mind over us that creates alot of fear and worry. Have you ever had the experience where you have to face a certain situation that makes you anxious and so you spend the days and weeks leading up to it compulsively thinking about how you will react, what it will be like etc. etc., only to find that when the day comes, it's not as bad as you thought and things worked out pretty uneventfully. Meanwhile, you've spent days concocting a limitless number of scenarios and movies in your mind, affirming your own skewed concept of yourself!

So according to Eckhart Tolle (and many others), you are not your mind. You are not what your mind tells you about yourself. So where does the power of now come into the equation? Well it is a fact that there can be no anxiety when you are fully in the present. Anxiety can only exist in the future or the past. So if we can keep ourselves in the now, life should be less of a scary experience. How do we do that? First step in this book is to "watch the thinker" as he puts it. Once you are aware of your thoughts, you can become aware that you are witnessing them, almost as a separate observer. I hope Mr Tolle won't mind me using a few excerpts from his book as he can no doubt explain it better than me!

"The voice (your thoughts) comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the
recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future
situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative
outcomes; this is called worry. Even if the voice is relevant to
the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind,
which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective
cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not
uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many
people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy."

Personally, I'm not sure I will ever be able to switch off my thoughts and achieve the kind of freedom that Eckhart Tolle writes about. But if we could all take the first step of dis-identifying ourselves from our minds and realising that thoughts are just chatter, maybe we could achieve a greater sense of peace in the now.