When you try to control your thoughts, you’re letting them control you.

June 7, 2018 Ben Gilberti 1 Comment

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This is an important idea. Trying to control your thoughts is difficult, frustrating, and rarely effective, all ways in which your thoughts are controlling you by causing you to make this stressful and futile effort.

You can stop letting them control you by letting go of resisting them and just observing them with neutral attention, letting go of wanting to control them in any way. When you do that they simply arise and flow by.

A wise sage once said, thoughts are no trouble if you let them fly by over your head, but are big trouble if you allow them to make a nest in your hair.

In some cases, however, the flow of your thoughts can be helpful. In my case, when I used to do a lot of lecturing, I never used notes because it makes the talk feel canned, lose its spontaneity and be boring.

So I pushed myself to just walk up to the podium or stage and trust that I would know what to say when I needed to say it. After a lot of practice, a very interesting thing began to happen: the flow of my thoughts became exactly what I needed to say at each instant, and quite often those thoughts were better than any thoughts I had had about the topic before, new ideas were coming in, in some cases thoughts that had never been thought by anyone ever before.

But this can’t happen if you’re in the habit of fighting to control your thoughts. Just let them flow. And more and more you’ll find that they’ll be precisely the thoughts you need in the particular situation you are in moment by moment.

~ Ben Gilberti

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One thought on “When you try to control your thoughts, you’re letting them control you.”

Jerry Mayor says:

June 8, 2018 at 7:12 pm

Thanks Ben…
Fighting for control has been useless.

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“When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.”
— Jacob Needleman in his new book What is God?

“A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.”
— G.K. Chesterton

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only at night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe

“Give thanks to unknown blessings already on their way.”
— Native American proverb at cafe in San Francisco

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
–e.e. cummings

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Bathtub Bulletin

When you try to control your thoughts, you’re letting them control you.

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Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more