The Power of Non-Thinking for Personal Fulfillment

Let’s hypothetically say that you really hate your job, and it causes you an enormous amount of stress, anxiety, and frustration. It pains you to even set foot in the building where you work, and just thinking about your job makes you furious. When you’re thinking about your job, you’re just sitting there on a sofa with your family watching a TV show together, but you are fuming at the thought of your job. Everyone is having a good time, except you.

In this moment, everyone else in your family is having a different experience of life than you, even. though the same event is happening. Just the thought of work created a whole different perception of reality, even though you’re not physically at work.

If it were true that external events cause us to feel the way we feel inside, then you should be a happy camper every single time you watch a funny TV show in your living room with your family-but that’s not the case.

We humans have evolved to develop the sophisticated ability to rationalize, analyze, and think simply because it helped us survive. Our mind does an incredible job of keeping us alive, but it does not help us thrive. It is concerned solely with our safety and survival, but not our fulfillment or joy.

The mind’s job is to alert us of potential dangers in our environment that may threaten our lives. It does its job so well that not only will it scan our immediate surroundings for threats, but it will even reference our backlog of past experiences to create hypothetical scenarios and predict what it thinks could be future potential dangers based on our memories.

None of this is wrong by any means. The mind is simply doing what it was designed to do. When we don’t understand that its only duty is to help us survive, then we will get angry and frustrated with it. All conflict is derived from an innocent misunderstanding. Our mind’s duty is to keep us alive. Our consciousness’s duty is to help us feel fulfilled. Your soul is the reason why you’re even on this journey in the first place to find peace, love, and joy for yourself.

There is a caveat that I haven’t mentioned yet to the principle that we can only feel what we’re thinking. The more accurate way of describing it is that we can only ever feel negative emotions when we are thinking.

The goal isn’t necessarily to completely stop feeling negative emotions. Some of the negative emotions can be helpful, such as feeling fearful when deciding to walk down a dark alley alone with no one else in sight.

These negative emotions are only helpful to us in terms of survival, but if we don’t constantly encounter life or death situations, negative emotions are more unhelpful than helpful for most of us.

It is not the content of our thinking that causes us stress, but that we are thinking, period. The amount of thinking we have going on is directly correlated to the magnitude of stress and negative emotions we are experiencing at any given moment. When you’re experiencing a lot of frustration, stress, anxiety, or any negative emotions, just know that it is because you’re thinking, and the intensity of those emotions is directly correlated to how much thinking is going on.

It’s not possible to just entirely stop thinking, but what we can do is reduce the time we spend thinking so that it gets smaller and smaller each day that passes.

Eventually, we can get to the point where we spend most of our day not caught up in our thinking and live in a blissful state most of the time.

When we say that we want to stop thinking, many people assume that we are trying to stop all thoughts in general. This isn’t what we’re trying to do. Now that you know the difference between thoughts and thinking, we are working on allowing thoughts to come and flow through us while we minimize the thinking about those thoughts that emerge.

The most interesting and almost paradoxical thing about stopping our thinking is that we don’t have to do anything to minimize it other than be aware of it. By becoming aware that we are thinking and that it is the root cause of all our suffering, it automatically makes us conscious to that fact and we become detached to it, allowing it to settle and pass. This takes almost no effort and is done through pure presence in the moment.

After practice, thinking hinders the performance of athletes and the same is true for everyone. We only hesitate, are reluctant, and have doubts, insecurities, and fears only when we begin thinking and over-analyzing.

We function and perform our best and embody our full potential the moment we enter a state of non-thinking.

Without thinking, we are free from limitations of the ego and are able to create the most incredible things in the world. I am not asking you to adopt this belief, but to try it and experience it for yourself so that you gain the insight to make it your own.

Unconditional creation is creating something without it being for another purpose, but purely to create it just because we want to create it. It’s not for money, fame, love, or anything else. We create it simply because we want to create it. This is creation from abundance.

When we create from this state, we already feel whole inside, and all of the love we want to feel is what we’re feeling in the moment.

We can only pursue unconditional creation if we are in the state of non-thinking. Our brains will make us think that it is pointless to do something simply because we want to, but that is the secret. As soon as we do things for no other reason, we step into the realm of living our life unconditionally. This is when we experience flow, oneness, and a direct connection to the Universe/God.

Source : Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60726415-don-t-believe-everything-you-think