Switching off the tap

We've been talking this week about the notion of ‘contaminated thinking’ – what it is, and what we do about it when we spot it bringing us down.

And to wrap it up I'm going to consider another question I got asked recently, on the same topic.

“Can we have less contaminated thinking?”

It's another corker, isn't it? Because it's looking upstream to causes, rather than just plugging holes downstream, putting sticking plasters on symptoms.

I'm a big fan of that. It's the essence of an inside-out approach:

• Why treat symptoms when you can address the cause?
• Why cope with problems when you can remove them entirely?
• Why try and change thought when you can see it as being utterly harmless?

(Reminds me of this image I created a while back, to illustrate different ways of dealing with stress in the workplace. Why waste time, energy and resources plugging the holes, when you could just switch off the damned tap?!?! 😆)

But I'm skirting around the can-we-have-less-contaminated-thinking question here aren't I, because of course the straight answer is:

No.

I don't think ‘we’ can do anything about the way the mind reacts to situations (if we could, wouldn't we have done it already?) and I think you pretty much get what you're given.

Your conditioning—picked up through a lifetime's experience—overlaid on top of your genetic make-up, pretty much determines that, as far as I can tell. Isn't that what it actually is, to be human?

🤷🏻‍♂️

So where does this leave us?

1. We can't change the content of our (contaminated) thinking – once it's there, in the world of form, it's there.
2. And we can't change the amount of (contaminated) thinking we get.

So what can change?

The stop tap

There's one thing that turns all of this discussion of contaminated thought completely on its head.

Because again, aren't we making a pre-supposition here: that ‘contaminated’ thinking is somehow ‘bad’?

That it's a real problem, that has to be dealt with?

Which means I get to change my mind about the original question and give a different straight answer:

Of course!

Of course you can have less contaminated thinking, if you no longer see it as ‘contaminated’!

Because here's thing that changes everything:

And you might just find that when you stop caring quite so much about what the mind is chuntering on about in any given moment—‘contaminated’, ‘encouraging’ or otherwise—it gives up the ghost and settles down on its own.

🥳

Giles

Related reading

Contaminated thinking

What does a contaminant actually *do* to the substance it’s contaminating? And what are the implications for us? 🔬

The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft

Pollution solution

What’s the solution to ‘contaminated thinking’, when we find ourselves lost in a thought storm? ⛈️

The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft