Breaking Identification with Your Thoughts

Thoughts at the Center

The exquisite thing about evolution is that it works; it really happens. C.S.Lewis says in Perelandra, “You don’t see the plan, because it’s all the plan. You can’t find the center, because it’s all the center.”

You don’t see the plan if it’s the plan. The whole business of knowing we know – experiencing separateness of subject/object knowledge. What do you use it for? You use it to gain mastery over nature and control and so on to survive, and gratification, until you’ve survived, and you’re getting gratification, and then you see, “It’s not enough,” and it takes you to the next plane.

Use the Rational Mind

In other words, use the rational mind until you’re done with the rational. Until it’s made itself an anachronism as a master, and then it becomes a servant; you use it when you need to use it, but you’re not hooked on it all the time.

Most everybody in this room wakes up in the morning. That’s partly true, wakes up in the morning, and then the alarm goes off, and they say, “Oh, there is the alarm. My knee itches. I gotta go to the toilet. I smell coffee.” You start with the whole trip and it goes on and on and on all day long.

Notice your Thoughts

See, you just keep doing it all day. You notice as your mind goes “Blip, Blip, Blip.” You could be sitting here listening to a word and then you feel your butt going to sleep and you think, “What time is it?”

So, all the thoughts are trying to just do their thing and just presenting themselves. You know, it’s like a lot of pretty girls going by, offering themselves to you; they’re each a thought that comes up and says “Think of me.” The next one says, “No, think of me, think of your body,” and still another one says, “Think of your responsibility to mankind. Think of your assignments, your belly, me, me, me.”

Total advertising push all day. Most people still function under the code, “I think, therefore, I am.” They still identify that’s who they are. “What do you mean all those thoughts? …That’s who I am!” But, of course, it isn’t because “I” is behind all that. It only really gets interesting when you start to break your attachment or identification with your own thoughts and your own thinking. You keep collecting experiences.

 

-Ram Dass

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