Thinking about thinking – how our thoughts can harm us or help us
[Sunday feast class at ISKCON, Sydney, Australia]
Video:
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So to summarize, I spoke on the topic of thinking about thinking.
How our thoughts may harm us or help us. And I talked three points. First was that our thoughts are not necessarily the way things are or the way we are.
Our thoughts are simply streams of words or images on our inner screen. I talked about this three-level physical reality. Somebody is in a security in charge in a control room for a building with five doors.
So that person is like the soul who is the inner seer. The screen on which all the camera inputs are coming, that’s like the mind. And the physical reality is out there.
So the soul is the root of consciousness. And the mind is the route of consciousness. So when people start going insane, then they start taking the inner screen too seriously, more than the outer scene also.
So for us, what appears on the inner screen is determined not just by the perceptions from outside but also by the impressions from inside. And sometimes those impressions may trigger certain start of certain movies which may distract us completely. So the mind, if it starts playing too negative a movie, it can even lead a person to kill themselves.
So the inner screen is not just some theoretical concept. The inner screen is very consequential in our daily lives. Then I talked about checking the content of our mind, checking our thoughts.
And for that I talked about five things, just the knowledge. There is this inner screen and these thoughts are not necessarily real. So having that knowledge helps.
The second is being purposeful, like in purposeful browsing we won’t get distracted by various links. So always having some purpose, what am I doing. So purposefulness helps and then we can have self-orientation.
I talked about three questions, what am I doing, why am I doing, how am I doing. And then I talked about identifying typical thought patterns and giving them a name. Oh that is a loneliness movie starting, that is a resentment movie starting, that is an over-eating movie starting.
And then fifth was whenever any disorienting thought comes up, attribute that thought first to the mind. The mind I am feeling angry, the mind is saying I am feeling angry. And then the third part I talked about, not just checking the content, checking our thoughts but changing our thoughts.
I talked about bringing Krishna onto our inner screen. By practicing the activities of bhakti yoga, we bring Krishna into our outer scene and we bring him into our inner screen. And Krishna becomes like the screen cleaner.
He is all pure and everything impure and distracting will gradually start going away. And as it goes away, we will be able to function more effectively. So although it may seem like the activities of sadhana bhakti take time, bhakti has two aspects to it, the world transcending and the world transforming.
So we withdraw from the world and focus exclusively on Krishna so that our consciousness gets cleaned by that. And after that, we engage in the world in a mood of service to Krishna. So although the world transcending aspects of bhakti takes extra time for us, but it’s not just another to-do because this to-do will clean our inner screen and our time is taken not just by our things to do but also by our thoughts.
And those distracting thoughts can take hours and hours of our time without ever appearing on our schedule at all. So if we can clean out those thoughts, then even if we have lesser time, we will be more focused. So bhakti is not just another to-do in our to-do list, but rather it is another way to do our to-do list.
Thank you very much. Hare Krishna. So should we stop or do we have time for questions? Is there any