THE LIES WE TELL OURSELVES

 

Think you don’t lie to yourself?  What a lie.   And it’s a dangerous one.  Your Mind isn’t evil – at least it doesn’t start out that way.  It generates thoughts constantly.  That’s it’s job.  It is trying to protect you.  You know – like a mother who always thinks she knows best?

As we grow up, we realize that– perhaps in spite of her best intentions – our mother is not always right. We develop “a mind of our own.” But when we place all our trust in the thoughts (that this Mind generates indiscriminately), it becomes a much more dangerous tyrant than our mother ever was!

Our minds are what in literature is called “an unreliable narrator”.  It’s telling us a story, but the story isn’t always true.

When we believe every thought our Mind tells us—good or bad– those thoughts accumulate. Many times, they become stories we tell ourselves over and over.  And the stories we tell ourselves over and over become the scripts we follow throughout our lives—complete with justifications, examples and probably most dangerous of all—feelings those stories always arouse that we don’t think we can escape.

Beliefs?  Beliefs are highly polished scripts created by this same process.

Let’s compare these “daylight” thoughts we believe are true to “nighttime” thoughts, which we call “dreams”. Dreams are filled with thoughts and images that seem very real when we’re experiencing them, and, like “daylight” thoughts, they sometimes create intense feelings that linger after we wake.

But we usually dismiss them – “What a dream!”  Repetitive dreams may haunt us, but we can usually dismiss them, too, when we wake up.  If we can’t, we go to a therapist and he/she tells us what they mean – and our conscious mind usually believes them, too.  And we add them to our scripts!  What a nightmare.

I will say it again: Daylight Thoughts are much more dangerous, not because they are more intense than dreams, but because we believe them.

Still don’t believe that it’s our thoughts that create our beliefs and our feelings—not “reality”?  Another form of dreaming most of us enjoy is watching TV and movies.  We profess to know they are not real.  But if that’s true, why were you crying? Why were you terrified?  Perhaps a better question would be, “Why did you pay to see the sequel?”

We humans like to feel things. That’s a wonderful part of being human.  It’s not having thoughts that is the problem … it’s believing them.

What would happen if you suddenly woke up to the fact that these Daylight Thoughts are no more real than dreams? After all, they both exist only in our minds!

Simply put, that realization is “awakening”.  If you could break the habit of believing everything you think, you would never have to go to another spiritual workshop!

Spoiler Alert:  You will probably still want to meditate, because meditation is the practice of remembering feelings of peace and joy and love that appear automatically when your Mind becomes your servant, not your master.