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If You Take Thoughts Seriously, You Take Life Too Seriously
“Suffering just means you’re having a bad dream. Happiness means you’re having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.” — Jed McKenna
Imagine you went to a stationery store and got yourself a whiteboard. There’s something magical about a blank canvas, isn’t there? You imagine all the great things you’re going to write on it, you’re happy and you buy it.
You rip off the plastic and begin to write down some ideas and thoughts. It’s nice to see your ruminations expressed. And if you have new ideas, you can erase what’s there and write new things.
Now, here’s a question. Are the thoughts that are written on the whiteboard, the whiteboard? No, of course not.
Are the thoughts that are written on the whiteboard a part of the whiteboard? No, of course not. The whiteboard exists whether or not there are words written on it, but we wouldn’t see the words or drawings if not for the whiteboard.
As you probably figured out by now, this is all an analogy. We are the whiteboard and we have thoughts. But we make the fatal flaw of thinking that we are our thoughts.
We fight to defend these thoughts because we think we will die if we don’t, even though we may die in defending them.
