Fusing with Our Thoughts and Feelings
When we take the content of our thoughts and feelings as an accurate representation of reality, we become lost in our experience and behave in non-virtuous ways.
By some estimates, we have around
50,000 thoughts a day. As you become more aware of the narrative voice playing constantly in your head, you notice that those thoughts are often negative. Your monkey mind flits from fragmentary thought to thought and is full of judgments about yourself and others. Would-haves, should-haves, and could-haves arise frequently. Grievances and thoughts of victimization are common. The desire to escape from our thinking leads to coping behaviors and addictions.
It happens that some individuals rehearse their grievances so often that it leads to violence.
Four years after getting the wrong sandwich, a customer assaulted the sandwich shop owners in New Jersey. Ruminating over negative thoughts, which are often old news, cannot enrich one’s life.
The 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that all the problems of humanity stem from our
inability to sit quietly without distractions. Our inability to deal with our inner mental life leads us, as
Carl Jung explored, to project onto others the worst qualities in ourselves.
How often do we barrel through life, thinking our overheated emotions are being generated by someone else? When enough of us think like that, we become a society of grievance holders and liberty is at risk. An authoritarian will quickly step in to harness our grievances.
Do not deny your thoughts and feelings, taught the Stoic philosophers. Instead, they advised becoming more aware of what our thoughts and feelings are costing us and then not being directed by them.
Anger was an issue at the time Stoic philosophers did their work, and anger is prominently acted out in our time. Seneca, in his work
On Anger, is clear: “A mind that becomes a slave to some passion must exist as though in a tyrant’s realm.” The internal tyrant we choose will soon be joined by an external tyrant we enable.
Anger, Seneca taught, “is the mark of a weak mind.” Weak minds don’t remain free.
In his timeless
Meditations, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius believed the quality of his life depended upon the “habit of examining methodically and honestly” all of his reactions to his daily encounters. As Marcus went about training his own mind, he asked, “What virtue does this require of me?” Notice, he wrote “of me,” not “of them.”
