The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website talk on wise thinking and when thinking is an automatic pilot,

it's way too easy for thinking to be stressful

or even harmful to ourselves.

It's very easy to spin out in all kinds of thoughts and worries and judgments and biases.

And we don't have to be the victim of our thoughts.

Some people are really major victims of their thoughts. They don't realize it because they think they are

their thoughts. They are their thinking. And if I'm thinking something it must be true because it's who I am. But thoughts are not

who we are. Thoughts are a product of the mind, but that doesn't mean that they define who you are, any more than your

growing fingernail defines who you are. It's just what the mind does. It's a product of the mind.

That is a consequence of many causes and conditions in the inner landscape. But we don't have to be identified with it and especially we don't have to be lost in it and have

to live at its whims going along with it or just coping and managing with how it is.

It's possible to think deliberately and in doing so to have a beneficial influence on the mind, the heart, the body itself,

on the world itself.

We don't want to think deliberately all the time. There's a time

for giving the mind the freedom to think whatever it wants to think. I do that when I exercise and I find that very

helpful and nice to give that kind of freedom to my mind, but I don't give that kind of freedom to my mind when I'm thinking. I don't get swept

along with my distracted thoughts, I marshal a deliberate attention, a

deliberatness of thinking to see and know that I'm thinking, to step away and

disidentify with thinking,

a way of thought, a way of thinking, a way of thoughting,

which has a more beneficial influence on me than the way that my automatic pilot thoughts might

...