Don't Believe Every Thought That Comes Into Your Head!

You do not have to believe every thought that comes into your head.  Neither do you have to believe every “feeling” that masquerades as a “thought”.  In fact, if you seek self-knowledge and greater wisdom and peace among peoples and nations, you must begin to question the thoughts that assert themselves — especially those exaggerated thoughts that have an adamant, strident, over-the-top quality.  Any thought/”feeling” that holds such an excess of affect about it that it causes you to lose your humanity should be questioned.  Those statements that are absolutist in their rendition are suspect, for such “absolute” statements sever us from our humanity and not only shut down all dialogue between ourselves and others but also between our higher function and the lower level thought that seems to have just sprung into our head.  The act of believing everything that comes into your head shuts off all discussion with it that might question the source of such adamant conviction.  The act of believing every passionate affect shuts off access to more nuanced feeling, true compassion and humanity.

If you stand back and say, “Wait a minute.  Is that thought actually true?  Is that thought even mine?” you will discover that all absolutist, one-sided thoughts and pronouncements have a peculiar quality of autonomy about them.  The “thought” has a different, whining, critical quality.  It did not spring up from you conscious awareness but from some more generalized, i.e., non-personal, non-specified morass of fear, resentment, and dissatisfaction.  If you begin to question, “Who is this pretender who speaks to me with my own voice?” you will begin to separate yourself from the overly negative/dis-empowering (self-deprecatory) or overly positive/powerful (self-congratulatory), prejudicial thought and begin to redeem and retrieve “middle earth”, i.e., your humanity.  It is the stepping back for a moment to consider the thought/opinion/feeling that is critical.

We are inveterately accustomed to believing that every thought and opinion that comes into our head is “ours” and has sprung up from our mental process, sui generis, rather than from an emotional underpinning.  But if you stand back a nanosecond and confront the thought that has just assailed you, you may begin to learn something important, like the fact that there is an entire Weltanschauung (unexamined world-view) that you have not questioned, but have taken for granted and imbibed like Kool-Aid, as “the way things are” — the unassailable “truth” and “given” of reality.  All exaggerated accounts and statements, whether negative or positive, remove us from a sober consideration of their verity.  It’s the quality of persistent, unmitigated adamancy and exaggeration that ought to suggest to one that something is afoot that one has not taken into account. 

 

I have lived a long time, so I have had long experience with thoughts that assail one as a kind of “absolute”.  I see it all the time in my teenage students:  the tendency to believe every opinion and pronounce: “I can’t do...  I’m no good … I’ll never be able to … I’ll never be happy… Everybody is against me… So-and-so hates me,” etc.  The autonomous quality of such negative opinions in a teenage girl (or in oneself) is really astonishing to behold.  I also see the rebound effect from such negative thoughts, with the student who swings to the opposite pole (the “I’m superiorly fabulous” pole) in an effort to somehow maintain a secure sense of self in the face of the withering attack of the negative opinions she has believed and “bought into” that erupt from within herself:  actions and attitudes like ostracizing others, petty hurtful actions and comments towards others, withering comparisons regarding the abilities or intelligence or appearance of others, etc.  Destructive as these attacks are, they are nothing compared to the destructive consequences of an immature males’ negative world-view, especially when roving bands of unattached youths get together.

For males, it has more to do with negative feelings than with negative thoughts, although because of the way we have begun to use language, the latter are most likely completely confused with the feelings in the youthful male.  Human beings are inveterately accustomed to inaccurately associating “feelings” with “thoughts” and then claiming them as “ours” (e.g., “my feelings”), and this confusion is a source of the horrible, terrifying consequences that play themselves out in our personal lives and throughout society at large.  An absolutist commitment to “my feelings” is just as bad as an absolutist commitment to “my thoughts”.  We ought to question all absolutist feelings or an exaggerated nature.  They’re just too ‘over-the-top’.

The powerlessness engendered by the assaults of defective feeling in the youthful male produces the rebound effect towards the opposite pole (the “I’m superiorly powerful” pole).  It’s the ‘God-Almighty-ness’ of such “feelings” and “thoughts” that should hint to us that we need to question their source as well as their validity.  We are human beings, not God.  Having assumed (mistakenly “owned” and inappropriately taken up) these defective “feelings” and “thoughts”, the youngster feels he must vehemently protect them, lest he lose his sense of self.  As with all mistakenly-owned internal messages, they are then projected onto others as well as onto God — with the most dire consequences:  the powerless identifying with the most powerful by taking up the banner of the Almighty, and claiming to be acting in the name of God/Allah.  Without a properly, humanly-related feeling function, the youthful male is at the mercy of his aggression that springs up from the well of his fear, resentment, and dissatisfaction.  Groups of unattached, immature males are, by far, the most dangerous animals on the face of the planet, because weapons and explosives are highly attractive to them precisely because these make them feel powerful, and their inadequate, less robust feeling function does not allow them access to the authentic empowerment provided by a humanly-related, moderate response; nor can the inadequate feeling function act as a barometer to adequately measure their own internal ‘weather’ — the emotional storm brewing on the horizon.

Where there is a well-developed, humanly-related, normal feeling function, it will serve as a moderating influence.  The immature female is usually (but not always) more related to her feeling function than the immature male.  Thus, she is, generally speaking, not so apt to pick up a gun or an explosive.  It is her opinions that tend to be inadequate and distorted.  At the mercy of her unconscious aggression that springs up from the well of her fear, resentment, and dissatisfaction, she much is more likely to skewer herself, or (passive-aggressively) skewer someone else with the weapon of a nasty comment straight to the weak center of a female opponent or a young male’s deficient feeling function.  Thereby begins a tale with sometimes dire and far-reaching consequences.

If all of us could just take a step back from our dearly held opinions and feelings, we might just be able to modulate the autonomous reactions generated from the unconscious and the prevailing Weltanschauung.  We ought not believe every thought or feeling that comes into our head.