Self Improvement
About Thinking and Suffering
The mind is its own place, and itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven, aye? I’m at the office and a little loose at work, so I decided to pure my anxiety into this shit. As a human being, we must have experienced suffering. No matter how fucking rich or noble your parents, even if your grandma’s queen Elizabeth or your father is Elon Musk. As long as u human, u will suffer and it’s inevitable. Mark my word.
I often listen to the stories of my friends. Usually they vent about things that make them suffer, such as love, career, family and so on. What really attracted me to listen to their stories wasn’t actually their storyline, or my fondness for seeing their emotional outbursts. However, my interest is more to “how can these things cause them to suffer and where does the suffering really come from?” As I listened to stories about what made them suffer, I came to one conclusion. A conclusion which is of course based on my personal opinion which has not been tested theoretically. The truth is up to you. However, this is my perspective on suffering.
If wealth, occupation, knowledge are not guarantees for someone to avoid suffering, then what is it? With my sense of naive, I would say it is our thought. Based on my personal experiences, I tend to complicate things that are actually simple. For instance, I was a person who likes to complain about things that I really don’t need to complain about. This complaint then makes my day worse and ends up making me suffer. The part of the chicken that doesn’t match with my request, the traffic jam, the coffee that’s too sweet, slow internet, and complicated client for example. These things often becomes the cause of my suffer which it shouldn’t be. The chicken is not wrong, but my mind is.
We live in a world of thought, not reality. Sydney Banks once said “Thought is not reality; yet it is through thought that our realities are created.” Each of us lives through our own perceptions of world, which are vastly different from the person right next to us. For example, you could be sitting in a coffee shop having a fucking quarter-live existential crisis, completely stressed out of your mind about how you have no idea what you’re doing with your shit when it seems like everyone else has.
Without our usual thinking about a particular event or thing, our experience of its completely alters. This is how we live in a world of thought, not reality, and how our perception of reality is created from inside out, through our own thinking. Therefore, you can change the reality by changing your mind.
My advice is, don’t fight your mind, its just futile endeavor. The analogy is like quicksand. The more that we fight our thinking, the more it amplifies the negative emotions and the worse it gets. The same is true for quicksand. if we’re in quicksand, the way out isn’t to fight it. If we panic and frantically try to fight it, it only makes things worse by tightening the grip it has on us and pulling us under faster. The only way out is to stop struggling and allowing the natural buoyancy of your body to take over to bring you back up to the surface with ease. The only way to break free from our thinking is to let go and trust that our natural inner wisdom will guide us back to clarity and peace like it always has.
Our reality is neutral event, but we put our meaning, thinking, or interpretation to it so it becomes something -either pleasure or suffer. Any meaning or thinking we give the event is on us and that is how our perception of reality is created. This is how our experience of life is created from inside out.
It’s not about the events that happen in our lives, but our interpretation of them, which causes us to feel good or bad about something. Maybe this is how people in third world countries can be happier than people in first world countries and people in first world countries can be more miserable than people in third world countries -remember calmness is the orientation of eastern philosophy. Our feelings do not come from external events, but from our own thinking about events. Therefore, we can only ever feel what we are thinking.
From there, if I can only feel what I’m thinking, didn’t I need to think positively to feel that way rather than complaining about the part of the chicken that doesn’t match with my request? Hmmm…
Reference
Joseph Nguyen. “Don’t Believe Everything You Think”
