thinking mind is neurotic

Thinking mind is neurotic

It's so difficult to watch one's own thoughts objectively. Everything arising in our consciousness is so subjective, and that includes our thoughts. And we tend to believe our thoughts. We get emotionally involved with them. We'll defend them. We'll attack other people, in order to back up our thoughts. It's neurotic behaviour, and usually we don't see it.

And what do we mean by neurotic? Basically there's an irrational fear. And we're not usually aware of it but there is just such an irrational fear underlying our thoughts, or at least our relationship to our thoughts. We've become identified with them. And that identity, that identification, leads us to behave in strange ways: neurotically.

Of course it's usually covered over with a veneer of respectability and normality. We're all playing by the same rules. We're all neurotic, so it's okay, that's the unspoken mass belief. It's not okay at least not if we want to get to the truth of matters. It's not okay if we want to find out who we really are, and what's going on inside ourself.

 

So even a thought which might seem innocuous, a thought that most people would be happy to agree with, even such a simple, innocent thought will carry this energy of neuroticism because we've invested our emotional energy in believing it, and we've become identified with the thought. So it is not a matter of whether the thought is objectively true or not. That's irrelevant. The important point is this identification with the thought. That is what requires us to be emotionally attached to it and defend it.

To get beyond this neuroticism, it's important to see it in oneself, to acknowledge it. Just notice how you argue, how you want to convince other people that your world view is right, is correct. Why? Why does it matter at all what other people are thinking, whether they agree with you or not? That need for confirmation, that need to feel right, is hinting at something else even deeper within us. And that deeper thing is an unconscious belief that we are wrong, not necessarily with the specifics of an individual thought, but that we are somehow fundamentally wrong, or fundamentally unacceptable. And this emotional game we play with thoughts, the identification with them, is really all an attempt to fill that gaping hole, to heal that wound that is deep within us, the wound of feeling I am wrong. And notice that this I am wrong is nothing to do with beliefs or thoughts being wrong. It's a belief that I myself, whatever I am, whoever I am, I myself am fundamentally wrong. It's an existential angst. We might put it into words in many different ways: that I don't belong here, that I'm not worthy, that I'm inadequate, that I'm incomplete.

And even further underneath this deep dark self doubt, there's a more fundamental aspect of our psychology, and that is our sense of separation. It's this feeling of being a separate self that has created a great isolation, an isolation that we are always trying to repair. We're always trying to connect. It's left a hole deep within our being, so no wonder we feel incomplete. We've cut ourselves off from the rest of existence. and that is the fundamental wound. That is what we're trying to heal all the time, without being aware of it. We're trying to feel whole again, and we're trying to do it with our thoughts, and our identification with those thoughts, and the way we reach out for confirmation from others with our thoughts.

This is not the way to heal that wound, though. To heal that deep wound, the wound of a sense of separation, we need to get in touch with it, within ourself, and sit with it, sit with that feeling of isolation, the aloneness, and the incompleteness that's implied in it. Only when we can really face that within ourselves, without any need to try and fix it, then there is a chance that the greatest miracle of life can happen: that the wound will heal itself, that we will realise, without words, that we are not separate, not separate from the rest of existence in any way.

This is the home coming we are yearning for. This is the only way for our neurotic mind to heal. And it's not brought about through thinking. This process is a process of being.