You Are (Often) Not Your Thoughts!
Some of the most profound life insights have the ring of trite prattle. Seize the day! Live in the present! Pay attention! Listen to others!… Here is another one: You are not your thoughts! Yeah, I know. The funny thing, though, is that it took me more than four decades to grasp the life-altering force of that particular maxim. By “grasp” I mean a moment or progressive growth into existential lucidity when instead of knowing something you begin to see through something; when something that borders on banality ends up transposing how you perceive self and others. For one, I became more attuned to how my mind concocts narratives, passes judgments, assesses situations and people, and nudges self-perceptions that mostly catch me unawares. Such automatic churning goes on all the time, and I often feel as if invited to a meeting where everything has already been decided, where my marching others are simply handed over to me. (Compared to the unconscious, Timothy Wilson in Strangers to Ourselves refers to consciousness as a snowball on the tip of an iceberg.)
Put simply, the possibility that I don’t have to be completely beholden to such automatized pattern recognitions is immensely relieving. Indeed, at any moment I can step away from the sewage-mind - that self-protective, condemning, censorious, worrying superego - and simply observe it without identifying myself with it. “You are garbage.” Whatever! “You will never succeed!” Blah, blah, blah. “You see how she hates you.” Here comes your typical, uninformed knee-jerk reaction. You do your stuff, go on, but that is not me. I cannot stop you, but I can step back from you and laugh at you. “Ghost,” you are pathetic. (How I came to name my Jungian shadow in reference to C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is for another time.)
Strengthening that “me” - the Observer, the alter ego, the higher self, the prefrontal cortex, or whatever else you want to call it - is, of course, a basic staple of cognitive behavioral therapies. It is also central to mindfulness practices found in various faith and wisdom traditions through the millennia, including the Judeo-Christian heritage. (Think of Psalm 42!) Some people do it automatically, others have to learn it. But the good life is difficult to be had without such practices of self-awareness that progressively give us a handle on self-destructive thought patterns.
[Note: This is just a throat-clearing post for me. With time, I will plumb the depth of this theme from a variety of perspectives.]