Ep. 175 – Instructions on Working with Thoughts

Insight Hour with Joseph Goldstein

Be Here Now Network

Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness, Vipassana, Buddhism, Insightmeditation, Meditation, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 864 Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of the Insight Hour podcast, Joseph Goldstein delves into the nature of thought and provides valuable insights on cultivating mindfulness.

This dharma talk from May 13, 2023, was recorded at the Insight Meditation Society and originally published on Dharma Seed.

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In this talk, Joseph:

Encourages us to notice when we become aware of our own thinking
Highlights the importance of recognizing the themes of our thoughts
Emphasizes that the past and the future are conceptual models
Examines the very nature of thought itself

“When we’re unaware of thoughts, unmindful, they have so much power in our lives, they;re really directing our lives. And yet when we are mindful of them, as I say, it is a little more than nothing.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	When we're unaware of thoughts, unmindful, they have so much power in our lives.
0:09.0	They're really directing our lives.
0:11.0	And yet when we are mindful of them as I said little more than nothing. Welcome to the Joseph Goldstein Inside Hour.
0:37.0	This podcast is an expression of our shared interest in self-discovery. Join Joseph as he shares his deep knowledge of the
0:46.0	path of mindfulness. If you are interested in supporting this podcast please go to be here now network.com slash Joseph. This morning we're going to emphasize more explicitly one of the most important and
1:19.0	challenging aspects of being mindful and that is quite explicitly making thought the object of the
1:29.9	mindfulness. You probably noticed that we live a great deal of our lives lost in the realm of thoughts.
1:45.0	And we often take the thought to be the reality itself.
1:50.0	And so to a large extent, we're just living in the story of all lives, you know, and the
1:58.9	thoughts that come into the mind like everything else are conditioned by a lot of different things of our past and our
2:06.3	upbringing and our education and society. So it's not that our thoughts are all original and unique to ourselves.
2:20.0	It's just a phenomena of minds which has basically taken over.
2:29.0	In this respect, the practice of becoming mindful that we're thinking, of recognizing that a thought is there and
2:37.9	what a thought is, is tremendously freeing. Kind of take us out of the box, you know, of our own particular stories and perceptions.
2:49.0	And we can see them more clearly and then assess in any particular moment is this
2:56.9	helpful is it not helpful instead of simply being carried away by the very many thoughts that are arising in the course of a day.
3:07.0	Somebody once mentioned a study where they had counted the number of thoughts typically a person has and I can't remember now So it's possible I'm making this up.
3:24.6	But my recollection is there was something like 10,000 thoughts a day or some huge number. You know, and you probably noticed that we are not
3:39.9	aware of a good many of them. We're just lost in them and at a certain point we come out from being lost.
3:47.4	So for myself it's a tremendously interesting arena to really pay attention to and to understand because there's kind of an
4:00.2	immediate sense of greater spaciousness, of ease of freedom when we come out from being lost,
4:10.0	or when we're aware of the thought as it's happening.
	...

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