How to Detect and Drop Useless Thoughts

Talk Takeaways

Anything that you can imagine cannot be new, because imagination uses the content of the past in order to create its images.

Thinking is useless to help you create the life of security that thought pursues in imagination. Thought can't deliver you to an unshakable security.

The spiritual solution to your problems is to become properly sick and tired of yourself.

The 'I' that reacts to the event was not there before the event that brings it forward.

Experience must be our teacher, not thought. Experience is awareness of all that is happening within consciousness in the midst of any condition.

Reactions point to what has stirred the reaction, directing our attention outside of ourselves, away from the content of the reaction itself.

Thinking about the disturbance is the disturbance. The orignal awareness of what is happening is not negative.

It is impossible to outgrow reactions. You cannot grow without them. The issue is the way in which those reactions are used, being aware of them or not.

Thought tries to rescue you from its own negative interpretation of what is happening in the moment. The first reaction to any condition is not the threat that thought believes it to be.

If you are identified with a reaction, then you can no longer see it. At that point your attention is on what the reaction is pointing to.

We are a living reaction, and we are the revelation of that reaction at the same time. We have been given the capacity to be aware of the reaction.

You must dare to be the answer you seek. Consciously suffer those thoughts telling you to seek elsewhere for what you already are.

Nothing can grow without struggle. Everything we meet along the way is necessary for genuine spiritual growth.

Trying to force any human being to be other than what they are is an act of violence.

The "first reaction" is always impersonal. The subsequent thoughts that follow make the moment personal and fashion it into something that must be manipulated in order to achieve a desirable outcome.

Do not try to stop being identified. That itself is identification. Instead see the pain in identification. That awareness provides the understanding that leads to proper response.