Don’t Believe Everything You Think | Joseph Nguyen| Book Review
‘Don’t believe everything you think’ is a book for the overthinkers, the anxiety prone individuals who suffer through their thoughts. It’s a practical guide for a life without despair. Thoughts are involuntary but thinking is optional. We encounter a lot of things in our lives that give us pain, but suffering is optional and how we react to the circumstances in our lives will dictate whether we suffer or not.
writing: 4/5
Presentation: 3.5/5
Overall: 3.5 /5
Genre: Self Help
Buddhists say that any time we experience a negative event in our lives, two arrows fly our way. Being physically struck by an arrow is painful. Being struck by a second emotional arrow is even more painful.
The five takeaways from ‘Don’t believe everything you think’:
- The difference between thoughts and thinking
- The three principles of the human experience
- How do we stop thinking
- What to do when you stop thinking
- How to follow your intuition
The Difference between thoughts and thinking
The author has made a clear distinction here between thoughts and thinking. Thoughts are something we have, not something we do. We cannot stop them. Thinking however is the act of thinking about our thoughts. It is this thinking that invites trouble into our lives. When we think about our thoughts, we apply our conditioning, judgements, beliefs and programming to them. We severely judge our thoughts and that introduces a lot of turmoil. Usually it’s not what we think about that is causing us suffering , but THAT we are thinking.
The three principles of the human experience
The three principles as described by the author are: Universal mind, Universal consciousness, Universal thought. Universal mind is the intelligence behind all living things. Being connected to this fills us with joy and peace. It is also where thoughts come from.
Universal consciousness is the collective consciousness of all things. Allows us to be aware that we exist and aware of our thoughts.
Universal thought is the thought introduced by the Universe. It is the power to create from the Universal mind.
How do we stop thinking
It is not always possible to completely stop thinking but what we can do is that, we can decrease the time that we spend actively thinking. The more we do that the lesser we will think. At some point it will get to a point where we don’t spend time thinking and instead spend our time in a blissful state of mind.
The best indicator to realise that you are thinking too much is to observe your feelings. If you feel like your life is unclear, disorganized and stressful, it’s only because your thinking is making it difficult to see ahead.
What to do when you stop thinking
When someone tells you to stop thinking, the first thought that will come in anyone’s mind is, what then will happen about my goals and aspirations? The simplest solution to this is to make goals from a place of inspiration rather than desperation. Goals created by desperation make you anxious. They don’t feel natural, and you don’t get a sense of accomplishment once you achieve them. Whereas the goals created from inspiration feel right to you. They are not means to an end but the end itself. Ask yourself, if you had travelled the entire world, made all the money you wanted, what would you spend your time doing?
How to follow your intuition
When you are in non-thinking or flow, beautiful things can happen. The right people, right circumstances, can show up at your doorstep. In such a case, trusting your intuition is of paramount importance. Trusting your intuition simply means, trusting yourself and having faith that your inner wisdom will show you the right path. It is only when we think that we have to figure things out by our own is when we run into problems.
All we have to do is hold on to non-thinking. This will enable us to access our infinite intelligence so that answers are revealed to us exactly when we need them.
My thoughts on ‘Don’t believe everything you think’
This book was full of valuable knowledge and insights. Something that can help the overthinkers. It does feel repetitive in some places. Some concepts are explained over and over again. Sometimes you are surprised by how trivial a detail is being explained. Maybe that is just the author’s way of catering to a wide range of audiences. Overall, ‘Don’t believe everything you think’ was very informative.
We can’t solve problems by using the same level of consciousness we were at when we created them.
-Albert Einstein
