Meeting Your Thoughts with Understanding

Meeting Your Thoughts with Understanding
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
Painting: The Death of Socrates Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Painting: The Death of Socrates Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Jacques-Louis David

My husband told me about Socrates. Socrates said, “If I’m wise, the only reason is that I know I don’t know.” I love that! I love that Socrates helped people question their beliefs, and that when the time came for him to drink the hemlock, he did it cheerfully. He wasn’t scaring himself or making himself sad, like his dear, unconscious disciples, by projecting a non-existent past onto a non-existent future. He wasn’t identifying with a body. When mind leaves the body, we throw it in the ground and walk away. He understood that whatever happens, reality is good. That would bring cheer to anyone’s heart. I don’t know a thing about his philosophy, but Socrates seems to me like someone who was loving what is.

When your heart is cheerful and at peace, it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, whether you live or die. You can talk or stay silent, and it’s all the same. Some people think that silence is more spiritual than speech, that meditation or prayer brings you closer to God than watching television or taking out the garbage. That’s the story of separation. Silence is a beautiful thing, but it’s no more beautiful than the sound of people talking. I love it when thoughts pass through my mind, and I love it when there are no thoughts. Thoughts can’t ever be a problem for me, because I have questioned them and seen that no thought is true.

If you learn to meditate, the mind becomes quiet, you can become very calm, and then it can happen that when you’re back in your ordinary life and you get a parking ticket, wham! you’re upset. It’s easy to be spiritual when things are going your way. When thoughts are simply observed and not investigated, they retain the power to cause stress. You either believe your thoughts or you don’t; there’s no other choice. They’re like someone whispering to you; you aren’t really listening, so you don’t react. But if you hear that person loud and clear, you can’t disregard what he’s saying and you may react to it. With inquiry, we don’t just notice our thoughts, we see that they don’t match reality, we realize exactly what their effects are, we get a glimpse of what we would be if we didn’t believe them, and we experience their opposites as being at least equally valid. An open mind is the beginning of freedom.

You can’t let go of a stressful thought, because you didn’t create it in the first place. A thought just appears. You’re not doing it. You can’t let go of what you have no control over. Once you’ve questioned the thought, you don’t let go of it, it lets go of you. It no longer means what you thought it meant. The world changes, because the mind that projected it has changed. Your whole life changes, and you don’t even care, because you realize that you already have everything you need.

This goes beyond simple awareness. You meet your thoughts with understanding, which means that you can love them unconditionally. And until you deeply see that not even thoughts exist, you may spend your whole life controlled by them or struggling against them. Just noticing your thoughts works while you’re meditating, but it may not work so well when you get the parking ticket or when your partner leaves you. Do you just notice your feelings without a residue? I don’t think so. We’re not there until we are. When we go inside and truly meet those thoughts with understanding, the thoughts change. They’re seen through. And then, if they ever arise again, we just experience clarity—a clarity that includes everyone.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot