“The best way out is always through.” ~ Robert Frost
To live is to feel a breeze of curious change gently surpassing over the sea of your existence – all the time. As humans, living with an insatiable curiosity is the core essence of our presence on this planet. We can’t expand or evolve without nurturing our desire to absorb and engage.
As thinking and feeling beings we land up in a state of uneasiness if we stop the very process necessary for us to thrive in this universe – think and feel. Spiritual teachers have echoed the idea of “feeling” as more superior to “thinking” because we live in a society where our thoughts are conditioned by our external settings each passing day.
It is difficult to stay in tune with your thoughts if you aren’t a self-actualized master yet. If we decode the many spiritual teachings, thoughts are more or less observed as barriers to openness.
This is because the mind loves to attach itself to the thoughts that feed
the ego – a strategy for its survival. The ego’s fear of death doesn’t allow you to experience the joy of an impulse or better known as “thoughts.”
“Your thoughts and feelings come from your past memories. If you think and feel a certain way, you begin to create an attitude. An attitude is a cycle of short-term thoughts and feelings experienced over and over again. Attitudes are shortened states of being. If you string a series of attitudes together, you create a belief. Beliefs are more elongated states of being and tend to become subconscious. When you add beliefs together, you create a perception. Your perceptions have everything to do with the choices you make, the behaviors you exhibit, the relationships you chose, and the realities you create.” ~ Joe Dispenza, You are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
But here’s a contradiction – the source energy enters our being with a thought. As we’ve recognised, the seventh chakra, also known as crown chakra, is associated with the element ‘thought.’ So, are thoughts really all that bad or we just accidentally got conditioned into thinking so? And, if we can experience a conditioned thought, can we not experience conditioned feeling too?
For example, we all got engineered into feeling patriotic. The consumer culture is very good at embedding feelings into us. So, it is in this time of chaos and confusion that we must ask ourselves: do we have to get rid of “thinking,” or just “egoistic thinking?”
Feed Your Mind vs the Control Your Mind Dynamic
To not think, essentially, means two things: disintegrate your crown, and disconnect yourself from the source.
A lot of people in an attempt to improve their lives have been trying so hard to control their thoughts, but to identify the mind as a separate entity of your being leads to confusion in the inner reality, causing us to experience intense amount of anxiety and resistance.
In fact, the current increase in the levels of anxiety in our society is a dominant reflection of two aspects of our condition: our thoughts are not in alignment with our feelings, and this keeps us indifferent to self-awareness.
Also, it is impossible to stay in touch with your feelings if you’re not in touch with your thoughts. As a living manifestation of this universe, we are meant to think as much as we feel and feel as much as we think. This is an authentic stepping stone towards self awareness.
As a society, we are scared of self-awareness because the process involves going through pain and letting go of our resistance to change. But the most compassionate act one can perform towards oneself is to let go of the fight and go on the path of self awareness, not aiming to fix but rather to accept – this involves accepting one’s thoughts and feelings completely.
As humans, it is impossible to experience joy, happiness, and clarity if our thoughts are not in alignment with our feelings. So next time you sit down to meditate – pay attention to your thoughts and your feelings, notice the divide while being in the state of learning.
State of Learning is Higher Than the State of Knowing
To keep learning is to stay in constant state of receiving, because it is in this state that one can listen to the sounds of abundant knowledge. Knowing is a state of limitation because this state involves turning your back to all that exists for you.
There is no joy in living life in such a state because you deny yourself from your true self which is the self that wants to constantly innovate and create.
This is why a lot of us feel frustration in our lives because we are fed the belief that one must know everything at all times. We feel left out and wonder if we are living the life we are meant to be living.
But our life was designed to be lived as a non-linear path consisting of series of unpredictable events because as humans we enjoy the joy of being in the “state of learning,” and “state of not knowing.”
We are meant to travel and explore unknown territories within ourselves. “What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning…,” wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky. There is a relief in the thought that all that should be, already is, and what remains is left for us to explore by thinking and feeling equally.
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