No thought being true

Jeroen

I was rereading the No Buddhist Quotes thread, it has kind of become a shorthand for my spiritual wanderings, and came across this:

“In that moment in which I realised that no thought is true, all other thoughts became irrelevant. They didn’t mean anything. They were just the mind trying to describe something, trying to tell a story.”
— Adyashanti

And it occurred to me that this is the ultimate freedom, that you can just abide in the peace of the body and be free from thoughts. No thought being true means that they are all just mirages, illusions, attempts by the mind to tell a story or divine the future.

Any conclusion we reach, even the gyrations we go though in a dream or a nightmare, even the things we think in response to a feeling, the emotions that we trigger by the thoughts we have, it is just so much fluff, irrelevant, we can let it go.

The mind is a mechanism for detecting threats, and in the realm of the immaterial there are no threats, so unless you’re on safari and having to cope with hungry lions and stampeding elephants, it’s thoughts can be safely let go of.

What a wonderful, light feeling! It’s a good morning to be alive

Shoshin1

From what I gather @Jeroen, thoughts can arise in an attempt to narrate the experience had by this karmically driven psychophysical phenomenon we call the self, they are also masters of illusion, often deluding this sense of self with make believe and when they do attempt to narrate the actual experience had, they never quite hit the mark, because of the constant state of flux/change the self finds itself in...Thoughts try to describe the indescribable aka reality...constantly changing experiences ...

Thoughts are always passing through the mind and our minds can often become charmed by them... This is when our developed Awareness( which comes from meditation practice) filters the thoughts, dismissing the unwholesome and nurturing the wholesome ones which can lead to/point towards the cessation of Dukkha/Unsatisfactoriness ...

Well that's the plan ....

Awareness is fundamentally non conceptual before thinking splits experience into subject and object... It is empty and so can contain everything, including thought... It is boundless, and amazingly it is intrinsically knowing

Jeroen

It seems that other people besides Adyashanti have also been saying this about thoughts. Byron Katie’s ‘Work’ is based on examining one’s thoughts for truth, and Eckhart Tolle and Diederik Wolsak have also talked about it.

I think these teachings point us at a good habit, acknowledging that our thoughts may be false means we have to take a certain distance from them and not identify with them. It points us at equanimity, because feelings arise in response to a thought. It seems to me that it is not too much to say that this is a core ability, a key knack — to leave our thoughts alone for a bit after they arise, and only then examine them.

If you can feel compassion for yourself as you examine your thoughts, then this habit can give you a great deal of inner peace.

person

In my experience there's a real interplay between thoughts and feelings. The feeling in the body gives rise to certain thought patterns and those thought patterns reinforce the feeling state. By letting go of thoughts at times, seeing them for what they are and dropping into the bodily feeling, those feelings begin to release and wind down.

And not identifying with thoughts and having compassion for the difficulty of thoughts that do arise are both really excellent practices in my experience.

I think a better word than false for thoughts is illusory. A mirage is illusory, the details of the appearance can be more or less correct but on closer inspection it all dissolves away. Like 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 are both thoughts, one is more true than the other but they are both illusory.