WHY DO WE EVEN THINK?
“I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once
into it.” — Jonathan Safran Foer
We as humans have evolved to develop a sophisticated ability to rationalize, analyze, and think because it simply helped us survive. Our minds do an incredible job to keep us alive, but it does not help us thrive. It is concerned solely with our safety and survival, but not our fulfillment or joy.
The mind’s job is to alert us of potential dangers in our environment that may threaten our lives. It does its job so well that not only will it scan our immediate surroundings for threats, but it will even reference our backlog of past experiences to create hypothetical scenarios and predict what it thinks could be future potential dangers based on our memories.
None of this is wrong by any means. The mind is simply doing what it was designed to do. When we don’t understand that its only duty is to help us survive, then we will get angry and frustrated with it. All conflict is derived from an innocent
misunderstanding. Our mind’s duty is to keep us alive. Our consciousness’s duty is to help us feel fulfilled. Your soul is the reason why you’re even on this journey in the first place — to find peace, love, and joy for yourself.
Your mind has done an amazing job at what it was made to do, but now you may relieve it of its job because we no longer live in the wild where death could be right around the corner in a bush. If we keep using our minds, we will constantly stay in a state of fight or flight, anxiety, fear, frustration, depression, anger, resentment, and all negative emotions because the mind thinks everything is a threat to our very existence. If you want to be free, happy, peaceful, and full of love, then you will need to let go of listening only to your mind and go beyond it by tuning into something much greater that will help you not just to survive, but to thrive.
