Different Sides of You

In a lot of Eastern traditions, people unidentify with their thoughts.

"I am not my thoughts," they say.

It's one of the many reasons they have no idea what they are doing.

“Identify with all your thoughts,” I say.

If you identify with all your thoughts (for example, by writing them down), they each show a different side of you.

Let's say you write down 1,000 of your main thoughts. Together, they are like the branches of a tree, with you in the middle of it. They are reflections of how you look at things.

If you unidentify with all your thoughts, you don't learn anything about the thing in the middle—the roots—which is you.

I also can't stand all this wishy-washy Buddhist nonsense. The guy sat under a tree, got shown a metaphor, and still didn't understand it. That's the most unbelievable thing about Buddha. What an unbelievably slow thinker. How many hints does Mother Nature need to give you? And then explaining it as if all people have egos is so ego-driven in itself. It's unbelievable. The guy wouldn't last a minute among smart people.

Without the wishy-washy language, here's what I mean.

If I have 24 hours in a day, and I have five main thoughts, the center point of those thoughts tells me something about the thing in the middle. It says a lot about who I am.

If you worry a lot, that also means you are responsible, because worrying on one side is taking care of a baby on the other side. You see how hard it is to explain these things in plain English. Let me try again.

You wake up in the middle of the night. You worry about your mortgage. You might think, "Worrying is not good for me."

But that's not true.

If you were looking after a baby, you wouldn't describe it as worrying. You would describe it as taking care of the baby. Yet psychologically, it is the same movement. The object changes, but the way you look at it stays the same. That says a lot about you.

Therefore, worrying is not bad at all. It depends on what you are looking at.

I love writing down all my thoughts from time to time. They all show a different side of me, how I felt at different moments in my life. It teaches you everything.

If you say, "None of my thoughts are me," you end up taking responsibility for nothing, because you can't even take responsibility for your own thoughts.

"Oh look, this man has a huge ego," a Buddhist would say.

No. You're simply not smart enough for this game.

Whether the thing in the middle actually exists or not is beside the point.