If you are seeker on a spiritual path, thoughts might seem to stand in the way of your evolution.
Thoughts run on completely spontaneously and effortlessly. They seem uninvited and unstoppable, an endless automatic stream of words with a mind of their own. Your mind.
Some people call this the tyranny of thought.
Why can’t you stop thinking? Worse yet (and here is the problem for spiritual seekers)—since you can’t, how will you ever quiet the mind sufficiently to contact and commune with your own pure consciousness, and to raise yourself to a higher level of spiritual being, and to dwell there without distraction and interference?
The way that you will do this is to know that you are not your thoughts. You were here before they were. Being precedes thought.
When you don’t identify with your thoughts, there can be no tyranny.
And in fact, it is possible to stop thinking. But you don’t do it by thinking about stopping thoughts. Instead, you drop your attention into pure consciousness.
If thoughts persist, then you just let them happen as you withdraw from them. They recede into the background, like boats on the surface of a lake that you are diving into.
They may never get totally extinguished. Answers From Silence says, “It’s not that you make everything stop. It’s that you let everything go….everything keeps going. But YOU stop.”
Then you can be, without thoughts.
—JC