If the perceived realities around a given event are so fluid, depending on viewpoint and time, one wonders how much time and energy we should actually expend on a thought, given that it is already in the past anyway? Especially if these thoughts have the power to trigger unhelpful feelings and emotions. A thought maybe true for a moment, then maybe it’s not. So how useful is it?
After a while we start to find that most of our random thoughts are not that trustworthy, really not that important, and moreover, a waste of energy. We tend to believe that our thoughts define us. They are us after all, aren’t they? But they change all the time, one after the other, down the rabbit hole we go. We aren’t a stream of thoughts, or a rabbit hole. Nor a feeling.
“I don’t trust my inner feelings, inner feelings come and go.” Leonard Cohen - That Don’t Make It Junk
The fact that we may have temporarily harboured a bad thought doesn’t make us a bad person; just as watching a great movie, imagining we’re the leading actor for a moment, doesn’t make that so either.
So our thoughts are not us, they are just transient impressions that happen to us. Mostly untrue, yes mostly just junk. ‘They are not personal’ as Byron Katie says.