Quotes About Thoughts

Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.

Just as the dog loves to chew bones, the human mind loves its problems.

You are not your mind

Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.

Let go of excessive thinking and see how everything changes. Your relationships change because you don't demand that the other person should do something for you to enhance your sense of self. You don't compare yourself to others or try to be more than someone else to strengthen your sense of identity.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.

In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer.

When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.

Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.

Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: "I wonder what my next thought is going to be." Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now.

The mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional.

If there is nothing you can do, face what is and say, 'Well, right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or make myself miserable. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it.

Every fragment of self-talk is a little story in the head that goes around, and then you look at reality through the lens of the little story.

You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.

Stillness is your essential nature. What is stillness? The inner space or awareness in which the words on this page are being perceived and become thoughts. Without that awareness, there would be no perception, no thoughts, no world. You are that awareness, disguised as a person.

The more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.

You are the light of Presence, the awareness that is prior to and deeper than any thoughts and emotions.

If there is awareness in you, you will be able to recognize that voice in your head for what it is: an old thought, conditioned by the past. If there is awareness in you, you no longer need to believe in every thought you think. It's an old thought, no more. Awareness means Presence, and only Presence can dissolve the unconscious past in you.

Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker.

You are cut off from Being as long as your mind takes up all your attention. When this happens — and it happens continuously for most people — you are not in your body. The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease.

Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it.

in it. It means consciousness is lost in its own dream. You get taken in by every thought, every emotion