7. River of Thought
EPISODE DESCRIPTION: I liken life to a river in most instances, and today is no exception. Join me as I wax poetic about a thing that consistently floods our minds; thought.
Episode theme song ‘Over the Mountains’ by Peter Matri
TRANSCRIPT
Hey, you! Welcome back.
In this episode, I'm going to talk more on thought mostly because this whole podcast of Mind Chalk is. Fleeting thoughts and behind many of my fleeting thoughts, which I just randomly and routinely discuss on these episodes. There's a principle that's backing what I believe thought is, like I said in the bonus episode, I believe that if people understood thought more, it would alleviate suffering, some suffering.
I also alluded in the Bonus Episode to learning a principle about a decade ago that really, really changed the course of the flow of my life. And if you know me, you know that I compare life to a flowing river or flowing body of water, mostly a river. And we are the driftwood, the floating entities within that river.
It's flowing is constant, right? Even when that region of the earth is suffering through a drought, there's always movement in this river. And this analogy goes on to convey that if we would just lie back and allow the river to take us all would be, well, even when we get stuck in algae or a beaver dam, we can at times feel this way, right? Trapped like no way out. There's no way we'll ever be in the flow again.
But then something happens in our life, a flash flood hits and that river—voila! We are suddenly free of the beaver dam.
Or speaking of flash floods, there's scary white water ahead and we know it's coming. We can hear it. We're terrified. But just keep going ‘cause guess what? The river will keep flowing, therefore, so will you
And you will go underwater in those rapids. Yes, you will. White water will suck you in. But guess what? You will pop up and out of that white water and carry on your merry way down the ever-flowing river. So there's never a reason to be afraid and not move forward ever.
The river will continue flowing and you therefore will as well.
So let's go move on to ‘thought.’ Thought is super simple. And I think some of the most important things in life are pretty super simple. So the deconstruction of thought goes like this. You have the greater MIND, which in essence is the Force of AllThings.
The creative energy that backs every single life form in the world, humans, animals, plants, anything that's alive, there's a creative force behind it. And really would anyone challenge that? It's kind of irrefutable. Even science will back it. So MIND, let's call it the creative force of all things. Back when it was originally in its original construct and explained to me it was called mind, but that's a bit confusing to me because we also have our own individual mind that is certainly connected to the creative force.
This creative force is much larger than us. We're part of it. We're like the droplet of water in the ocean The ocean is that creative force, not necessarily the droplet of water, even though that droplet of water makes up the ocean or is part of what makes up the ocean. So do you see my differentiator? In the ocean as a whole, one cannot look into that ocean and depict the separate droplets of water.
So instead of MIND, we're going to call it Creative Force, Creative Wisdom. So next we have consciousness. And consciousness is where we hang out when we bring a thought to life, right? It's our thought playground, where we make thoughts into something.
And as the trailer of my podcast conveys, thought is transient, it's not fixed. It's malleable. It isn't even real. Thought goes in, it goes out. We don't always know where thoughts come from. We like to take credit for our thoughts because a great one comes in and it lands for us. I don't know if I came up with that thought. I just followed it. You know? I gave it meaning.
So let's say the thought comes in, “Oh God, it's raining. Today's gonna suck.” Okay, well, it's just a thought. Let it go. It may be raining. That might be true, but the meaning you gave the rain is not. The thought isn't telling you it's gonna be a sucky day. You've decided it will be. You gave the thought meaning.
But I think what we do is we think that thought is telling us something, but the thought is just going, “I'm gonna float right into your brain. I have no real meaning, but I'm gonna see what you come up with.”
Thoughts probably have a heyday with us!
Every once in a while we'll land on a thought. We'll think we can use it to further a project or further an idea and bring it fully into manifestation. And that's a constructive use of thought. So don't get me wrong, I'm not saying thought is irrelevant, it's just that the meaning we give thought doesn't make that thought any more true, but it makes its capabilities true for us. Right?
And here's the other thing. Thought is personal. Think about how people protect thought, protect what goes on in their minds because it's sacred, it's secret, it's theirs, it's ours. So as a thought is coming through and you suddenly wan to to put a universal definition on it, I hate to say it, but you're in error. You're using thought incorrectly.
This is an amazing awareness for collective, universal constructs. They don't work for everyone because they're not supposed to work for everyone. Thought is personal, herein lies why belief is personal—because it's based on your own personal thought.
Watch your thoughts. See how they don't mean anything until we put meaning.
I did it with this podcast. I started to think about, “Wow, thought is an amazingly entertaining playground for the mind. It's so interesting.”
We bring [thought] to our consciousness and then we play around with it like, “Oh God, I feel a knot in my inner thigh. I must have groin cancer.”
Whereas someone else would say, “Oh gosh, I better massage that and work it out. It might be scar tissue.”
Or “Gosh, those adductor exercises I'm doing…hmm. I better make sure I'm not overstraining my muscle.”
They're not running out and getting a checkup because they think they have cancer.
Thoughts are personal and a whole lot of things contribute to why we land on a particular thought and make it about something. So this is powerful because it's a teaching ground.
Like, “Ah, okay. If we can separate ourselves from it and go “Hmm, look how much meaning I'm giving this thought,” that gives us distance from it.
And by the way, the other reason for this podcast was very much because thoughts are fleeting. They're not only fleeting because that's just how they work, but for me, they're fleeting because I don't have the greatest memory anymore.
Think about the name of this podcast. CHALK—it’s fragile. It's easily erased.
I used to remember conversations verbatim, and now there are holes in those conversations and I have to work to remember or work to get to the conclusion of that conversation because the conversation itself, I can no longer remember word for word. So this whole piece about thoughts are fleeting, became personal to me.
Like, Yeah, I'll have a thought and if I don't write it down, make some sort of note that reminds me of that thought, it's gone.
Some thoughts I haven't written down have gone, and I've sort of lamented them like, “Oh man, that was such a great idea and now I can't remember it.”
So if anything, in these seven minutes, every weekday, I'll share thoughts and you'll have thoughts.
Thoughts like, “Holy shit, that's mind-blowing.”
Or, “Uh, she's really dumb.”
Or “Could there be a more annoying human being on the planet?”
I mean, you're going have thoughts about my thoughts.
Okay, I'll see you tomorrow.
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The podcast is hosted, produced, and edited by Jenée Arthur.
Cover art by Jenée Arthur
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