I’m thinkin’

~ Live & Learn

ig_scandebergs; shadow;portrait; scandenbergs

For I need to know precisely this one thing:

am I feeling what I am feeling,
or am I feeling what I wanted to feel?
or am I feeling what I would need to feel?

— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

Notes: Quote: The Vale of Soul Making.  Photo: Scandebergs (via this isn’t happiness)

 

 

32 thoughts on “I’m thinkin’”

        1. Eckhart Tolle would say, stop latching on your thoughts and let them flow as if you were watching clouds. This has helped: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/a-conversation-with-eckhart-tolle_b_5174112.html
          An excerpt here:

          Q: The ego is central to your work and the series — how to understand it, talk about it and ultimately transcend it. How can we begin to free ourselves from our own egos?

          Tolle: In A New Earth I dealt in more detail with the ego and the various ways in which it manifests. I recommend that people read those chapters, but here I’d just like to mention that on the most basic level ego means complete identification with the thinking mind. In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind — in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self. This mind-made sense of self is a mental image, and you live through that mental image. This mental image is the ego.

          How you can free yourself from the ego is by realizing that there is another dimension of consciousness in you. That dimension is in everybody, but if you’re completely identified with every thought that comes into you head, then you continuously overlook that there is that dimension of stillness and spaciousness inside you. Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts. When you become your thoughts, that is the ego. To realize that you are not your thoughts is when you begin to awaken spiritually.

          For example, when your mind is very critical of yourself or other people, frequently complaining or berating yourself or creating anxiety by worrying about what might go wrong in the future, this creates a lot of unhappiness. Then you reach a point where you ask yourself, “What is at the root of this unhappiness I feel all the time?” And then you may be amazed to realize that in most cases when you are unhappy, you’re not unhappy because of something that’s happening in your life; you’re unhappy because of what your mind is telling you about it. It’s not a situation or an event that makes you unhappy but your mental commentary about it, the voice in your head. When you realize that, that’s when you begin to disidentify from the voice in your head. The disidentification from thinking is the arising of presence. Then you realize that there is a sense of conscious presence behind your thoughts, and that this conscious presence is who you are. The thoughts happen within that presence, so thoughts come and go.

          I like to give the analogy of the sky. The sky also has two dimensions: There are clouds, and there is the empty, blue sky. In this analogy the clouds are your thoughts, and they continuously drift past. And for many people there are so many clouds that their inner sky is continuously overcast. They don’t realize that beyond the clouds is a vast, blue sky — luminous vastness. But then a moment comes when there is a break in the clouds, a gap between two thoughts, and you realize, “Oh, the clouds are there, but I am that spacious vastness that is beyond the clouds.” That means you’re beginning to be free of the ego. Then your sense of identity is the feeling of your own presence. This is the realization that the essence of who you are is consciousness. Consciousness can be compared to space. It enables everything to be. We could put it like this: You are not what happens; you are the space in which it happens. That space is consciousness.

          Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are. When you no longer confuse thinking with who you are, you begin to be free of the ego. It doesn’t mean that you don’t periodically fall back, because awakening is gradual.

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  8. You didn’t tell me to bring a #2 pencil. Sharpened.
    You didn’t warn me that there was going to be a test today.
    May I be excused to go to “The Ladies”….?
    ….and get a drink of water? ….not feeling well.

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  9. Your post make me think of communication, internal dialogue and external communication, be it verbal or non verbal…I am thinking of how the source of much discord and pain comes from assuming, assumption isn’t truth…one must be brave and ask questions, even when the outcome isn’t what we’d like to hear,,,Life is full of unanswered questions and we have to either seek further clarification, seek knowledge on the subject or as we all know recognize that we will never receive an answer and live with the mysterious reality of that…one must deploy discernment in seizing up a situation, at times agree to disagree, admit when we are wrong…we must Feel and Feel deeply…we must Struggle… we learn of ourselves and of others…and at times some people just can’t escape the inner dialogue of their respective minds and they are in a state of chaos…”am I feeling what I am feeling,
    or am I feeling what I wanted to feel? or am I feeling what I would need to feel?” I say , Yes, at different times in our lives we have experienced each one of these aspects of “feel” it is finding a balance among the depth….one word that I ponder over which I think has ramifications to this “feel” is “expectations”…should we have expectations at all, or in some areas? Yes, I think there should be common manners…but living a life without expectations can “Free” a person and then when something unexpected comes along one can choice to receive this as a Delightful experience, Joy producing, Serendipitous, a difficult Challenge, Unwelcome, a Blessing or a Miracle…We also must learn to accept & to forgive…

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  12. Couldn’t have said it better! How odd- to ponder the intent of our feelings. Sometimes a feeling is just that… a feeling. Guess it’s easier to ‘think’ about it rather than feel.
    Thank you for this reflection. I hope it offers a moment of pause for others as well.

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