A thought is harmless unless we believe it

[carac]

I stumbled across a quote this morning

"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

This made me think, how many of us here because we think things, we believe and give power to them things then they come true and it become a viscious cycle.
We fear pain and this thought itself induces more pain. We fear lonliness and that fear cripples us and causes more lonliness. We fear anxiety and this makes us even more anxious.

How many times have we been told "don't worry about it" such a useless statement that only causes more worry.

I will leave you with a final quote from Frank Herbert from the Novel Dune

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

 

[timf]

Another example is how we react if insulted by a stranger or someone we care about. Both may say the same words, but we give more credence to those who know us. It can be helpful to sort of mentally "quarantine" what we hear or think until we have had a chance to examine it analytically. For example, if someone says, "You stink", we can ask ourselves if it is true. If not, we can then dismiss the remark as one made out of frustration or anger (which can help us understand the mental state of the speaker) but has no basis in reality.

 

[LonelyTurkey]

I stumbled across a quote this morning

"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

This made me think, how many of us here because we think things, we believe and give power to them things then they come true and it become a viscious cycle.
We fear pain and this thought itself induces more pain. We fear lonliness and that fear cripples us and causes more lonliness. We fear anxiety and this makes us even more anxious.

How many times have we been told "don't worry about it" such a useless statement that only causes more worry.

I will leave you with a final quote from Frank Herbert from the Novel Dune

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

I'm bookmarking this post. My thoughts have ruined so much for me over my life and they continue to do so. I will most certanly forget this post in a few hours but hopefully I can come back to it. Thank you.

 

[alonely]

I'm glad you posted this. Yesterday I found a similar line from the "Emptiness" wikipedia article that really stuck with me.

"thoughts are merely illusions from labelling by the mind"

I've been looking at so many things online to try to find some meaning of life or some way to get out of this place that I've been in for so long. I think it's somewhat ironic that a lot of the snippets that have stuck with me from everything I've been reading are from Buddhist philosophical ideas surrounding thoughts, the mind, death, suicide, etc. (I'm very atheist)

 

[carac]

I'm glad you posted this. Yesterday I found a similar line from the "Emptiness" wikipedia article that really stuck with me.

"thoughts are merely illusions from labelling by the mind"

I've been looking at so many things online to try to find some meaning of life or some way to get out of this place that I've been in for so long. I think it's somewhat ironic that a lot of the snippets that have stuck with me from everything I've been reading are from Buddhist philosophical ideas surrounding thoughts, the mind, death, suicide, etc. (I'm very atheist)

I used to be quite a militant athiest and would really argue with people that believed in a god and find them stupid. As I've got older I've learned to respect others beliefs and not judge them too harshly, I think I have also become more agnostic.

The one thing I've struggled with and looked at in more recent times is humanity and it's view of the world. I think we are increasingly moving toward a science and rational based approach to understanding the world but we are discovering that there are things that break the rules and cannot be rationally explained.

 

[painful existence]

The original quote is by Epictetus who was an ancient stoic philosopher.It goes like
"What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance".
Stoicism is a wonderful philosophy.I think everyone should check it out.It helped me a lot.