The Heaviness of Thoughts
Today, I am light in my thoughts in that I am not particularly preoccupied with any given thought. And this is a privilege, for it means that my needs are taken care of for the day. If they were not taken care of, of course, perhaps I would be thinking of that more. And those thoughts would weigh on me heavily.
However, many people who have their needs taken care of still deal with endless, unhelpful thoughts. Often, we invite a lot of this heaviness in. For example, with the news, media, commercials, nonsense discussions, toxic individuals, and on and on. We open not just our ears and eyes to this useless information, but we open our minds to it, and it becomes a virus that infects us.
An issue with many of our thoughts is that they become giant monuments that we carry on our shoulders. All the thoughts you have ever had or been exposed to are like a giant statue you must carry with you everywhere you go. And the strange thing is that we stop realizing that we carry these with us. We think they are a part of us, but perhaps they are not. Maybe we have chosen to carry them around.
You carry these ideas and add new ones every day, and so every day, you become more sluggish, thinking that you know more but actually know less. In thinking we have accumulated facts and information, we believe ourselves to be smarter, more knowledgeable, or wiser, but we rarely are. What grows more than our knowledge is our mental anguish, as we invite the mental virus to infect us.
And so sometimes, there is nothing wrong with forgetting it all and retreating to a mental space of quiet.
But how do we get there? To tell you to meditate (or exercise or do yoga, etc.) may be futile. Either you do meditate, or you don’t. Either you know how to quiet the mind, or you don’t. Either you are conditioned to attend to thoughts and magnify their importance and obsess over them, or you are not.
It’s not that these patterns are unchangeable, but this change takes commitment, and it takes an awareness that the thoughts may have just led to self-poisoning rather than to clarity and knowing.
Clarity is in the thoughtlessness, where we are not dealing with cobwebs in the mind. You can attend to the few worthy thoughts when you clear those cobwebs. And there are just a few.
Most thoughts are draining, not resolving anything, not leading anywhere, so I have learned to let them go.
Yet, to claim that letting go of thoughts leads to pure bliss or happiness is false.
Aiming for clarity and wishing to reduce unnecessary thoughts can also be exhausting. I find that for every 100 thoughts, either the rethinking of old views I’ve had or being exposed to new information that leads to certain thoughts, over 99% lead nowhere. Yet, I still prefer to move away from those thoughts, rather than to absorb them and concern myself with them.
Think of it. Whether you’ve had one thought per day or a million, what is the difference in the end? I would pity the person who had a million of them and revere the one who only had a single thought, as long as that single thought had been worthy.
Ultimately, we must choose the thoughts that can lift us up.
If you enjoyed this post and want to learn some of the worthy Thoughts, you may wish to read 7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life. (on Amazon and other major retailers).
