Just a Thought

1. Your Mind is a Constant, Storytelling Machine

That’s just what minds do.

The inner narrator. Your mind is a non-stop voice, an inner narrator that constantly comments on everything, offering opinions, labels, and a second-by-second play-by-play of your experience. It loves categories, identities, and relating everything back to "you," the center of its universe. This voice is often repetitive, contradictory, and prone to drama and exaggeration, adding story, meaning, and feeling to everything.

Mechanical process. This constant mental activity isn't personal; it's just the mechanical output of a brain designed for prediction and efficiency. Like wind-up chattering teeth, the mind spins and chomps, creating a dramatic show. Taking this mechanical output personally or seriously is where suffering begins, confusing the temporary, cheap plastic with your true self.

Background noise. Sometimes the voice falls silent, and life feels brighter and more vivid. Other times, it races like a helmet full of urgent thoughts, making life feel full of immediate problems. Recognizing this narrator as a universal, mechanical process—"just what minds do"—allows its habitual stories, fears, and criticisms to fade into the background, opening up a world beyond the mental hum.

2. Your Sense of "You" is a Mind-Created Illusion

You are not who you think you are

The "me" story. The seemingly stable identity you call "me"—full of traits, memories, and preferences—is a by-product of how your brain works. Your brain, designed for survival, loves certainty and creates a solid "you" by categorizing and labeling, even fabricating reasons and stories to make sense of things, often sacrificing accuracy for a sense of security.

An adaptive illusion. This sense of a separate self is an incredible gift that makes life engaging, full of growth, winning, and losing. However, it's an illusion created by thought in each moment, not an independent, stable entity. Research on split-brain patients shows how the left brain, the "interpreter," constantly weaves plausible but often wrong stories to create coherence, including the story of "you."

Source of suffering. 100% of suffering is rooted in the idea of a stable "me" that can be hurt or damaged. When we believe this mind-made identity is real, we feel the need to protect it, creating rules, limitations, and avoiding perceived threats. This innocent misunderstanding of a well-working brain leads to a small, fearful world, as Taoist philosopher Wei Wu Wei noted: "Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one."

3. Your True Nature is Untouched, Like the Sky

You are the sky, and your experience is human weather.

The Golden Buddha. Like the Golden Buddha covered in stucco, your true nature is pure gold—peace, love, wisdom, confidence, creativity—untouched by the layers of thought and identity your mind created to keep you safe. When something scary happens, your mind builds a façade, and you innocently identify with the temporary psychological experience, falling asleep to your inherent well-being.

Weather passes through. Your moment-to-moment experience—thoughts, feelings, cravings, fears—is like weather moving through the sky. It arises within you and travels across, from scattered clouds to violent storms, but it never damages the sky. Just as you can't control the weather, you can't control your human experience; it comes and goes on its own.

Undamageable essence. Human weather doesn't damage who you are. Your essence is health, clarity, and peace, impossible to be fundamentally altered by impermanent experience. Trauma or loss may feel like they left a permanent mark, but that's the mind's interpreter spinning a story. The "damage" is just habitual, inaccurate, temporary thoughts and feelings, not you.

4. Thoughts and Feelings are Impersonal Energy in Motion

Your thoughts and feelings are no more personal or meaningful than the weather.

Energy plus story. Feelings are fluctuations of energy to which your mind attaches words and stories. Thought and feeling are two sides of the same coin, formless energy experienced in different forms. The same physical energy can be labeled fear, nervousness, or exhilaration depending on the mind's interpretation, as seen with Bruce Springsteen's pre-show jitters.

Formless taking form. Your essence is formless energy, constantly turning into temporary form (thoughts, feelings, bodies) and returning to formlessness, like light through a kaleidoscope or waves in the ocean. Your brain acts as the apparatus, funneling this energy through well-worn pathways, creating habitual thought forms like Lucy's fear of mistakes or Hannah's eating cycle.

Universal process. This process of energy taking form is universal, not personal. You don't purposely create your thoughts or feelings; they arise through you. Judging yourself for them is like blaming yourself for the weather. When you see that the mind's labels and stories are subjective and not the truth, feelings don't feel as personal or serious, changing more quickly and naturally.

5. Discomfort is a Signal, Not a Problem

Suffering is always life trying to wake us up.

An alarm system. Discomfort is a brilliant, loving alarm system showing you that you're identified with a tiny, thought-created fraction of who you are. It signals that you're caught up in a fleeting wave of energy, mistaking temporary psychological experience for something solid, personal, and true.

Pointing you home. When you get lost in your mind's narrative and forget who you are, you feel discomfort. This tension is life whispering, "You're bigger and freer than you currently see." When you don't listen, it screams. Suffering isn't something to fix or avoid; it's a wake-up call, like Ahmed's anxiety being his "call to prayer," urging you back toward the peace of your true nature.

Increased sensitivity. As you relax into who you are, your mind quietens, and you become more sensitive to discomfort. Tightness or fear arising in wide-open peacefulness is immediately noticeable, a reminder that you're focusing on a minuscule fraction of yourself. It hurts to be a pure-gold Buddha covered in dirt, and that pain is the alarm clock trying to wake you up to the truth.

6. Minds Worry by Imagining Problems

The things we worry about usually don’t happen because worry isn’t about what’s happening in the outside world.

Imagination vs. reality. Worry is your imagination creating dramatic stories and images that you confuse with reality. It's the natural result of an ancient brain, evolved for immediate threats (like hyenas), mismatching with today's delayed-return environment. Fear, once an adaptive response to immediate danger, becomes chronic anxiety about things that aren't real.

Filling in blanks. Because there's no immediate action to take against imaginary threats, the fear lingers. Your mind, hating uncertainty, fills in the blanks by imagining what might go wrong, spinning tales full of detail and emotion based on minimal sensory input (like a bank statement number). This looks like inevitable reality, but it's pure imagination.

Masking common sense. Worry feels helpful, like it prepares you for problems, but it doesn't. The problems aren't real, and worry fills your mind with scary scenarios, making it harder to access creativity and common sense. It's an alarm showing you're caught up in thought, not a protective tool.

7. Minds Compare to Create a Sense of Security

Minds love to compare, it’s just what minds do.

Securing position. Minds constantly compare you to others or to self-created expectations because they think your survival depends on knowing your weaknesses and securing your position as "safe" and "enough." This comparison game is how the mind attempts to predict the future and prevent failure.

Inaccurate and limiting. This constant comparison is unhelpful and inaccurate due to the brain's negativity bias, which inflates perceived weaknesses. Believing these comparisons creates insecurity and limits your world, as seen with students in The Little School of Big Change who felt "behind" based on mind-made rules and comparisons, leading to disengagement.

Made-up game. The concepts of "ahead" or "behind" are created and defined by the mind. When you take them as truth, you get caught in a game your mind invented. Seeing that comparisons are just a machine-mind trying to nail down an un-nail-down-able "you" allows you to look beyond the noise and see that you and life are always safe and thriving.

8. Minds Create Problems They Then Try to Solve

Minds chew on things and replay them ad nauseam.

Self-created anguish. Your mind constantly works to solve problems, but it often creates the problem in real time. Matthew's anguish over a past work issue wasn't coming from the event three years ago, but from his mind's present-moment identification with thoughts, memories, and "what if" scenarios, deciding things should be different than they are.

Searching for problems. In the name of protection, minds look for unsettled business to resolve, replaying misunderstandings and arguing past debates, especially when you're uncomfortable. Your mind seems to forget you were fine before it resurrected the past to "fix" it, chewing on things like a dog on a bone to feel productive and relevant.

Clarity from beyond. While rehashing can sometimes precede an insight, the clarity doesn't come from the mind's repetitive chewing. It arises from beyond the monotonous, chatty mind, from the formless space of intuition and wisdom. Your mind isn't the savior; it's the instigator and credit stealer. The heavy feeling of rumination shows your mind is caught in thought, not solving an objective problem.

9. Minds Tell You You're Never Good Enough

Your mind will never tell you that you’re good enough.

Moving the finish line. Your mind constantly points out a "not-good-enough-yet" void, promising that some future accomplishment ("someday") will bring lasting confidence and rest. But like Bethany's pursuit of success, marathons, and travel, your mind will always up the ante and move the finish line.

The seeking instinct. This is partly driven by the brain's seeking instinct, which rewards exploring and thinking ahead with dopamine. However, believing the mind's promise that the next achievement will bring long-term satisfaction is a misunderstanding. "Someday" is a mind-made concept; you'll never arrive there by working harder or collecting accolades.

Void is an illusion. The feeling of lack comes from tuning into the mind's conversation about what's missing, not from an actual void. The images of future success feel good only because the mind shifts from criticizing to imagining improvement. You are already whole and at peace; the void is an illusion created by your mind's plans for your improvement.

10. Life Lives You; You Don't Control It

We are lived.

Guided by intelligence. If no thought is the truth and reality is always changing, how do we navigate life? We are moved through life by the same formless energy that grows flowers and spins planets. This infinite intelligence guides us, bringing experience to life moment-by-moment in real time.

Beyond management. Life is not yours to manage, despite your mind's narration that it's risky and your job to get it right. While it appears you make choices and have free will, actions are taken, thoughts are thought, and feelings are felt through you. The narrator then tells a story where "you" made it all happen, making the game more exciting for the main character.

Safety net. This understanding that you are lived by something that knows what it's doing takes immense pressure off. It's the freeing side of things, less familiar than the "I'm-pulling-the-strings" view. Life has your back, providing a built-in safety net, even when your mind tells you otherwise.

11. Waking Up is Seeing, Not Doing

Change doesn’t start with action.

Effortless shift. Deep, lasting change starts with waking up and seeing things in a new way, not with action or willpower. Like growing up, your worldview evolves naturally, and behaviors follow without conscious effort. When you see your psychology as moving energy and become familiar with the expansiveness beyond it, everything shifts effortlessly.

Subtractive process. Waking up is subtractive, an unlearning. There's nothing to add or acquire; you already have everything you need. It's seeing that the thoughts, judgments, and identities that looked like "you" aren't. This clears up the simple misunderstanding of mistaken identity.

Insight, not effort. The "how" of waking up isn't a step-by-step process; it's the result of seeing. You look in a new direction with an open mind, willing to see something new, just by reading and exploring. Insight is sustainable; willpower and effort are temporary. When you see the truth, your attention naturally shifts from fleeting psychology to your stable essence.

12. You Can't Be Stuck; Experience is Always Changing

You can’t be stuck.

Illusion of stuckness. If humans are always-updating processes, why do we feel stuck? Feeling stuck is a reflection of repetitive thinking, a mind having a cyclical conversation about how life should be different. Life is always moving, regardless of how sticky your thinking feels.

Mind-made diagnosis. Labels like "generalized anxiety disorder" are concepts that classify fleeting experiences. Tina felt stuck not because she "had" anxiety, but because her mind took the diagnosis seriously, viewing it as a stable, personal problem. Her feelings of stuckness were a mind-created experience, kept alive by misunderstanding how her mind worked.

Letting go. You can't be stuck. When you feel like you are, you're zoomed in on a repetitive, sticky, mind-made story. Feeling stuck is a gift, reminding you to back up, soften your focus, and let new experience flow through. It's a reminder that anything that hurts is just temporary experience, not a permanent state.

Last updated: April 29, 2025