New Understanding to Release You from the Pain of Unwanted Moments

Talk Takeaways

We are not looking for new ideas to understand with the old mind. Rather, we are looking for a new mind that already understands.

A moment of beauty is silent because there is no thought involved in it.

A mind that is being consumed by itself does not think to itself that it is being eaten alive by its own thoughts.

Fearful, tormented, anxious thoughts cannot be quieted through more thinking.

Painful thoughts appear with a thinker that analyzes those thoughts in an attempt to find freedom from the pain. The thinker is bound to the thought. The thinker and the thought are not separate things, even though they seem to be opposites.

We do not really see each other. Rather, we see our thoughts about each other. Our thoughts about others are filled with the pain of the past.

We do not really see the problem. We see our thoughts about the problem.

The mind looks through its familiar resources, its own content, in order reconcile the conflict it feels in unwanted moments. The thinker reaches for the most available thought.

The blind shall lead the blind, and both shall fall into a pit. Darkness believes that the darkness is the light.

Your thought about the moment is inseparable from your experience of the moment as you think about it.

We believe that the pain of a thought is separate from the one thinking about it. The thinker believes it is separate, and so believes it can reconcile the pain.

"Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." -- New Testament

Not wanting what you are thinking about creates the illusion that there is a "you" that is separate from those thoughts and the event that the thinker is thinking about.

We are not going to untie the Gordian Knot that thought has created by thinking about it. The knot created by thought cannot be untied by thought.

"From unreality lead me to the real, from darkness to the light, from death to immortality." -- Upanishads

Only the light of awareness can reveal and release us from the pain of the illusion that the thinker and the thought are separate things.

The mind that awakens to itself sees that it is the producer of its own pain.

The only thing that darkens our days is identification with thoughts that call themselves the light.

Real prayer is the action of observing thought and the thinker.