Eaton Satsang
Thoughts & Thinking
What we call the ‘mind’ consists of nothing but thoughts, and this brings about many questions which are, after all, onhinkingly more thoughts. Are ‘you’ the thinker of thoughts, or is even the idea of you just another thought? How and where do thoughts originate? We know we can’t control thoughts - try to not have a thought! Can you notice a tendency to believe thoughts when they first appear, only to dismiss some of them that conflict with other thoughts? Can you separate a thought from a belief? What do you think/believe about enlightenment?
The Indian sage Ramesh Balsekar liked to make a distinction between the ‘thinking mind’ and the ‘working mind.’ The latter he describes as that portion of the thought process that allows for ordinary functioning, and is a most useful tool of everyday life. The thinking mind, however, he describes as being driven by those erroneous egoic beliefs that claim independent, autonomous ownership of the actions of the mind/body. The reality of the human situation, he describes as follows: "Every thought, however simple or complicated, comes from outside, and your brain reacts to that thought according to your genes and conditioning." Further, "We have no control over an arising of a thought or an arising of fear or anger or whatever. Arising of any thought, emotion or feeling is independent of the (human) organism.
In the following quotes you will find teachers who suggest overcoming thoughts or mind; these sayings are mostly in reference to the ‘thinking mind.’
Quotes
All your problems are just thoughts. And thoughts are not a problem.
~ Jeff Foster
Through observing the illusory nature of thought without resisting it, we can begin to question and inquire into the underlying belief structures that support it. These belief structures are what form our emotional attachments to the false self and the world our minds create.
~ Adyashanti
The more you think and talk, the more you lose the Way. Cut off all thinking and pass freely anywhere.
~ Xin xin Ming
When there are thoughts, it is distraction. When there are no thoughts, it is meditation.
~ Ramana Maharshi
From where does the I thought arise?
Who is having this original thought?
All arises from nothing/absolute.
Let it be seen that it is simply a happening in consciousness,
that there is nobody having any thought.
Know that it is not 'you' having this thought.
That's the belief that creates the suffering ability.
~ Jac O'Keeffe
The only true freedom is the freedom from thoughts and its consequences.
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
In the unawakened state you don't use thought, but thought uses you. You are, one could almost say, possessed by thought, which is the collective conditioning of the human mind that goes back many thousands of years.You don't see anything as it is, but distorted and reduced by mental labels, concepts, judgments, opinions and reactive patterns.
~ Eckhart Tolle
People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.
~ Anthony de Mello
Your thoughts are a veil on the face of the Moon. That Moon is your heart, and those thoughts cover your heart. So let them go, just let them fall into the water.
~ Rumi
You think you are thinking, but you are actually listening.
~Terrence McKenna.
The methods are, as we know, to get quiet. Quiet the mind. The moment the mind is quiet enough, this infinite Being that we are becomes self-obvious. So the method is very simple: quiet that mind enough so that you see this infinite Being that you are. Now the moment you see it, the moment you see this infinite Being that you are, you’ll immediately go to work to undo the remaining thoughts that you are not it. And when there are no more thoughts, there’s only the infinite Being left.
~ Lester Levenson
The thinker himself cannot possibly effect the cessation of thought. Insofar as he is involved in the thought of ceasing to think, he himself is the perpetuation of thought. But if the thought process is merely watched or impartially witnessed, it will subside on its own and take the thinker with it.
~ Ramesh Balsekar
When you catch yourself thinking, stop yourself immediately by asking yourself, “To whom do these thoughts come? Who’s thinking these thoughts?Where do they come from? I am thinking these thoughts. Who is the I? Who gave birth to the I who is thinking these thoughts?"And you'll feel and say, “The I does not exist. It never existed." You will feel beautiful. You must keep this procedure up. The mind must be transcended.All is well. All is exceedingly well.
~ Robert Adams.
Don't trust the mind. It's the ultimate Fake News. (Only the Heart knows the Truth).
~ Jeff Foster
Don't believe your thoughts. I am the body is a thought. I am the mind is a thought. I am the doer is a thought. Worry is only a thought. Fear is only a thought. Death is only a thought.
~ Ramana Maharshi
Thoughts appear as a necessary function in the human organism. The organism does not decide to create them any more than it decides to breathe. They are sourced from that which sustains and supports the organism. To believe that you can stop your thoughts presupposes that you initiate them.
~ Wu Hsin
To feel and experience real happiness, causeless happiness, requires a conscious or unconscious surrendering of your interest in your thoughts.
~ Jac O'Keeffe
One of the functions of thought is to be occupied all the time with something. Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are. We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
I think, therefore, I am not here.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Here's a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.
~ Eckhart Tolle
Our thoughts have no roots, they have no home; they wander just like clouds. So you need not fight them, you need not be against them, you need not even try to stop thoughts. This should become a deep understanding in you, because whenever a person becomes interested in meditation he starts trying to stop thinking. And if you try to stop thoughts they will never be stopped, because the very effort to stop is a thought, the very effort to meditate is a thought, the very effort to attain buddhahood is a thought. And how can you stop a thought by another thought? How can you stop mind by creating another mind? Then you will be clinging to the other. And this will go on and on, ad nauseam; then there is no end to it. Don't fight - because who will fight? Who are you? Just a thought, so don't make yourself a battleground of one thought fighting another. Rather, be a witness, you just watch thoughts floating. They stop, but not by your stopping. They stop by your becoming more aware, not by any effort on your part to stop them.
~ Osho
Be prepared to know that you are not your thoughts. You have thoughts. The number is estimated to be in the region of 90,000 daily. But they are not you and do not define you.
~ Jac O'Keeffe
A common misconception is the belief that thinking is the creation of thought. Rather, it is the reception of thought from a source which has no name and from a place that cannot be found. Since one can’t decide to think nor can one decide thoughts’ contents, why does one claim their ownership? Is every sound Wu Hsin’s because he can hear them?
~ Wu Hsin.
Thoughts are just what is. They appear. They're innocent. They're not personal. They're like the breeze or the leaves on the trees or the raindrops falling. Thoughts arise like that, and we can make friends with them. Would you argue with a raindrop? A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It's not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it's true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we've been attaching to, often for years.
~ Byron Katie
Veil upon veil, thought upon thought Let go of them all, For they only hide the truth.
~ Rumi
Your past only exists because you think about it. Your fears, your frustrations, only exist because you think about them. Where would they come from if you didn't think about them, if you didn't bring them into play in the present? Where would they come from? How would they be there? You are the cause of all of your problems.
~ Robert Adams
If you go the way of your thoughts, you will be carried away by them, and you will find yourself in an endless maze.
~ Ramana Maharshi
Although thoughts appear in the present, their content is always about the past or the future. These are mere stories that serve to distract from the knowing of What-Is.
~ Wu Hsin
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. In this world hate never dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible.
~ Buddha (from the Dhammapada)
Just be quiet, be still and stop participating in the imaginary world created by your thoughts. There is no identification when the mind is not engaged with thoughts; no suffering is a consequence of no identification.
~ Jac O'Keeffe
There is a way for a person to awaken, and that way is to stop thinking. Stop thinking. When the mind becomes quiescent, quiet, still, realization comes all by itself. There is absolutely nothing you have to do to bring it about. It makes no difference what you're thinkinggood thoughts, bad thoughts, or any kind of thoughts. All thoughts are clouds, all thoughts. It is your thoughts that cover up the Self. Whatever you allow what you think, you cover up the Self more and more and moreYou're only covering up the Self. The Self will shine all by itself when you stop thinking. Stop thinking, totally, unconditionally. Stop thinking.
~ Robert Adams
Until the storm of conceptual thinking subsides and the mind learns to rest in a fasting state, one's true nature must remain unknown and inaccessible.
~ Ramesh Balsekar
Thoughts are like bait to a fish; if we bite at them, we get caught. It’s best not to bite at the thoughts. We don’t need them. Inside of us, but out of awareness, is the truth that “I already know everything I need to know.”
~ David R. Hawkins
When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice — the thinker — but the one who is aware of it.”
~ Eckhart Tolle
A thought arises and it is perceived. What makes it "my thought"? The bird sings and it is perceived. Does one make it "my song"?
~ Wu Hsin
Thought is the breeder of duality.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
Everyone is this naturalness. When we start calling it enlightenment and awakening, thought can use that to compare, right? But if we say this naturalness or this simple presence, thought can't run a comparison study. The whole invitation is to look prior to language, prior to concepts, prior to thought's projection.
~ Pamela Wilson
Nothing terrible has ever happened except in our thinking.
~ Byron Katie
Don't believe your thoughts. I am the body is a thought. I am the mind is a thought. I am the doer is a thought. Worry is only a thought. Fear is only a thought. Death is only a thought.
~ Ramana Maharshi
Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.
~ Bodhidharma
It is extremely important that you become fully aware that you are the witness. For that eliminates the old patterns and the habit of thinking yourself to be the thinker or the doer.
~ Jean Klein
I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in the silence, and the truth comes to me.
~ Albert Einstein
The world is not what you think it is; the world becomes exactly what you think it is. Such is the power of belief.
~ Mooji
All dreams are substitutes and all thinking also. Because thinking is dreaming while awake, and dreaming is thinking while asleep.
~ Osho
Fear has only 2 causes: The thought of losing what you have, or the thought of not getting what you want.
~ Byron Katie
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
~ Shakespeare
I have been asked many times, "How do you stop thinking?" And I have found one way. The minute I can look at any person or condition and know that it is neither good nor evil, my thought stops, and my mind becomes quiet. That is the end of it because then there are no thoughts left for me to think about it: I do not think good of it and I do not think evil of it. All I know is that it is, and then I am back at the center of my being where all power is. Our mind is restless only when we are thinking about things or persons, either in terms of good or evil, but the mind is at rest when we surrender all such concepts.
~ Joel Goldsmith
Whatever you think happens after you die doesn’t.
~ Byron Katie
Thoughts are subtle, and every thought that is entertained as real places you back in the drama of your personal story.
~ Jac O'Keeffe
You always have to think. Why do you have to think? You think you have to think, yet there is no thinker. You think you have to know, yet there is no knower. You think you have to be. There is no being. There just is, and you are that is-ness. When you admit that you are that power, nothing can hurt you any longer. When you accept that you are the one, no harm can ever come to you. When you admit you are that pure consciousness, that is like having an entire army on your side, an army of angels, so-to-speak, protecting you, guiding you, directing you, leading you towards the goal, whatever that may be, if there is any such thing.
~ Robert Adams
Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.
~ Wayne Dyer
The important thing is not to think much, but to love much; and so, do that which best stirs you to love.
~ Saint Teresa of Avila
The task of any useful spiritual practice is therefore to dismantle cherishing the thoughts, opinions, and ideas that make up the false self, the self that is seeking. This is the true task of both meditation and inquiry. Through meditation we can come to see that the only thing that makes us suffer is our own mind. Sitting quietly reveals the mind to be nothing but conditioned thinking spontaneously arising within awareness. Through cherishing this thinking, through taking it to be real and relevant, we create internal images of self and others and the world. Then we live in these images as if they were real. To be caught within these images is to live in an illusory virtual reality.
~ Adyashanti
Usually we use our words to relate things about the past, to relate old concepts and memories. So our expression, our thinking, is dead. I’m saying this to emphasize that conceptualizing on its own is not necessarily bad. Thinking can be a creative process when we are in touch with the nowness of experience, and that nowness (presence) is the source of our thinking.
~ A.H. Almaas
The search for the self is a fantasy. It happens exclusively in the mind. Because it exists only in the mind, the true self, that which is always present is missed. The mind will insist that it is right. But all the mind knows only itself. The mind is thought and only exists as thought. Thought is all it can know. So the me and you that we "think" we are, is only one thought among many thoughts. In the end, all seeking is without end. For it is only in pursuit of the "perfect me thought" and that is the fantasy that keep the perpetual machine moving. How could we be a thought? Drop the fantasy and the real "me" shines in every moment, it shines in every feeling and it even shines in every thought. The real me is which cannot be denied and which is always present.
~ Eric Gross
This is what is asked of us, over and over and over, to offer our empty hands. To let the things we are holding so tight just drop. To give it all up, everything, that does not exist in this moment here. All that has happened, that we think we somehow need to do something about, all that we think might happen, or we hope will happen, every sweet dream that we cling to. This is like God’s loving strip search, give it all over! Something else wants to live you. And you can feel it.
~ Jeannie Zandi
You save the world by taking responsibility for your awakening and then where that awakening leads to, you follow. Maybe you will be a social activist, maybe you will be a hermit. That’s not up to the thinking mind; the thinking mind is no longer the leader, it is the follower. The thinking mind is an exquisite follower, but first it has to surrender to follow. You have permission to be yourself.
~ Gangaji
The mind is here to keep you earthbound. When you stop thinking, the mind becomes the infinite, becomes God, becomes boundless space, nirvana, pure awareness. It doesn't really become that. You've always been that. The mind merely disappears, as a mind, and your true nature is expressed.
~ Robert Adams
The thinker of thoughts is merely another thought. The one who knows this isno longer in his own way.
~ Wu Hsin
At the outset of self-enquiry, it is necessary to make an effort to abide in the Self. This results in a natural abiding in time. The unnatural state of an outward focused mind must be brought around to being inward focused, and this alone is where effort lies. Mind thinks it has something to do in order to realize its true nature. It only has to be quiet, not engage with thought and then it must bebypassed.”
~ Jac O'Keeffe
The difference between suffering and liberation is the difference between being the thinker of thoughts and being the awareness of thinking.
~ Jeff Foster
The Work reveals that what you think shouldn’t have happened should have happened. It should have happened because it did, and no thinking in the world can change it.
~ Byron Katie
The next thought is only as strong as the attention you give it. It’s only as significant as it appears for you. It derives its charge, its power, from your interest, your attention. In fact innumerable sensations, thoughts, they come as visitors they pass through the space of your own seeing, and much of them, you have no interest in them and what you have no interest in is not registered inside your psyche, your memory. So, effectively, if it doesn’t get registered it hasn’t happened, it doesn’t exist. Unless the mind says something exists, nothing exists. Unless the thought comes “yes, this thing is” and not just the thought comes and says “this thing happened” but the belief in this thought something happened, if the belief doesn’t join with the thought - nothing happened…. Whatever is happening is what you have interest in.
~ Mooji
The ostensible purpose of all meditation, is the cessation of thinking or conceptualization; but this can never be achieved by any entity, because an entity is itself the thinking process. A deep understanding of this truth, however, can itself lead to a spontaneous fasting of the mind, whereby thought ceases effortlessly on its own, as would a clock cease, whose winding has been allowed to run down.
~ Ramesh Balsekar
Witnessing is always present, never the past. Thinking is always the past. Thinking is dead, witnessing is alive....When you verbalize, you are closed to experience. When you are non-verbally aware, you are open, vulnerable. Witnessing means a constant opening to experience, no closing. What to do? This mechanical habit of so-called thinking has to be broken somewhere.So whatsoever you are doing, try to do it non-verbally...You are walking on the street: walk non-verbally, just walk, even if just for a few seconds, and you will have a glimpse of a different world - a non-verbal world, the real world, not the world of the mind man has created in himself.
~ Osho
The Sage has no thinking mind, therefore there are no ‘others’ for him.
~ Ranama Maharshi
I think, therefore, I am not here.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
What is called 'mind' is a wondrous power residing in the Self. It causes all thoughts to arise. Apart from thoughts, there is no such thing as mind. Therefore, thought is the nature of mind. Apart from thoughts, there is no independent entity called the world. In deep sleep there are no thoughts, and there is no world. In the states of waking and dream, there are thoughts, and there is a world also.
~ Ramana Maharshi
The arising of any thought, feeling or emotion, is independent of the person. It is only when involvement by a person occurs, that the thought, feeling, or emotion becomes personal.
~ Wu Hsin
The body is always HereNow, the mind is never HereNow, that is the whole conflict.
~ Osho
Wanting to control thinking is itself a thought. Even in observing thoughts, if you have a preference not to be attached over being attached to thoughts, then this too is mind.
~ Jac O'Keeffe
Next time you have a brilliant thought, ask yourself from where it came.
~ Roger Castillo
The original stressful thought is the thought of an 'I'. Before that thought, there was peace. A thought is born out of nothing and instantly goes back to where it came from. If you look before, between, and after your thoughts, you’ll see that there is only a vast openness.
~ Byron Katie
Your thought advocates Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In my thought there is only one universal religion, whose varied paths are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being. In your thought there are the rich, the poor, and the beggared. My thought holds that there are no riches but life; that we are all beggars, and no benefactor exists save life herself.
~ Khalil Gibran
There are so many thoughts in the mind. Thought after thought after thought. But there is one thought that is continuous, though it is mostly sub-conscious: 'I am the body'. This is the string on which all other thoughts are threaded. Once we identify ourselves with the body by thinking this thought, maya follows. It also follows that if we cease to identify with the body, maya will not affect us anymore.
~ Annamalai Swami
Fabricating objects in the split-mind is what is called "thinking". But thinking is not man's real nature - it is what prevents us from seeing our real nature.Yet, there cannot be any prescriptive method, to bring about the cessation of thinking, because any such effort would emanate from a "me", that is itself nothing but a product of thought.
~ Ramesh Balsekar
You have changed your thought, but thought is always conditioned. Whether it is the thought of Jesus, Buddha, X, Y, or Z, it is still thought, and therefore one thought can be in opposition to another thought; and when there is opposition, a conflict between two thoughts, the result is a modified continuity of thought. In other words, the change is still within the field of thought, and change within the field of thought is no change at all. One idea or set of ideas has merely been substituted for another. Seeing this whole process, is it possible to leave thought and bring about a change outside the field of thought? All consciousness, surely, whether it is of the past, the present, or the future, is within the field of thought; and any change within that field, which sets the boundaries of the mind, is no real change.A radical change can take place only outside the field of thought, not within it, and the mind can leave the field only when it sees the confines, the boundaries of the field, and realizes that any change within the field is no change at all. This is real meditation.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
Sam Fu used to think that he thought.
Upon investigation, he discovered that
Thoughts arise in the expanse of awareness and that
There is no thinker thinking.
Sam Fu now watches the show as
A spectator in the audience.
He may laugh.
He may cry.
He carries on his normal activities.
Yet never forgets That which facilitates and is
The support of these activities.
~ Wu Hsin
Without thought there cannot be an individual who exists apart in any way. To exist apart IS the thought, it is never the reality. Only the Self is real.
~ Jac O'Keeffe
