Dear friend,
Synchronicities are increasingly common as you shift your awareness out of a singularly materialistic worldview towards seeing the connections between all things.
I don’t know if you read other Substacks? There’s a feature, if you go on the platform, called Notes, where people post. It’s a bit like social media. Today there were lots of messages about inner silence. It made me blink in surprise.
Then I reached into the stack of Presence Cards on my desktop—the actual desktop, the one I’m sitting at now, not the digital one we all spend increasing amounts of time at—and I pulled out a card which reads: “If I’m not thinking, do I still exist?”
Well, you can’t think about a question like that too long without missing the point.
Thought can be so incredibly pleasurable.
It can also be hell.
I was sitting in my therapist’s worn leather chair. She was careful to keep the room the same, year after year. The same lighting, decor, plants.
The same soft, soothing piano music just in earshot.
The same blue suit, barefoot. She’s a physically small woman whose feet just about reached the floor where she sat, with the same black folder on her lap, into which she either wrote notes or doodled.
I never saw them.
She’s using a metaphor to disrupt the patterns of my mind.
“Imagine a light switch,” she’s saying. “When you flick the switch, how quickly does the light come on?”
“What’s this got to do with anything?” the voice in my head is saying. I’m experiencing it in my head, but maybe it’s not in my head. Maybe I assume it’s in my head because I assume I think with my brain and listen with my ears, so I’ve always felt like the voice is in my head.
I’m concentrating with the force of my will.
The money I’m paying to sit here demands it of me.
“It feels like it’s instant,” I reply, “but there must be a delay, really short, but anyway, it’s quick—so quick you wouldn’t notice.”
“Exactly,” she says.
Something is opening up between us.
Space.
“That’s the way thought works. You have a thought; it’s like flicking the light switch and immediately you feel it as an emotion or response in your body. Flick the switch, experience the feeling.”
The idea slips past my defenses.
“How come I’m learning this now?” I’m thinking. “You’re kidding me. It’s so obvious. How could it take thirty-plus years to work it out? How dumb am I?”
A pause.
That was a moment.
Nothing changed.
I just began to see things more the way they have always been.
That was twenty-plus years ago.
Sometime around the turn of the century.
When you realize you are not your thoughts, that’s enough.
Our bodies still react as if every thought is reality.
But you know it’s not.
You can recover.
One tip is to measure the recovery time.
Did you come back to feeling okay in an hour?
A few hours, or minutes, or days?
For me, recovery shrank from months—maybe, if I’m honest, years.
That’s priceless.
If I’m not thinking, do I still exist?
One to ponder.
If thinking is happening, then ground it in compassion.
That feels better than attack and self-reproach.
People are suffering at the hands of people who believe every thought that arises in their minds. The more angry you get, the more certain you become that the voice is telling the truth.
If you’re in a relationship of any sort, you know about it.
If your mind clears of thought, then so be it, but don’t chase it.
Just be kind.
Breathe.
So many people are swimming before my eyes right now.
Till tomorrow.
Love,
Mikey