Read: 2026-02-15
Recommend: 6/10
This book is a good refresher on the concept of the two arrows: the original pain and the self-induced suffering. What was new to me is the distinction between thought (the initial idea that arises) and thinking (the rumination that follows), and how the latter can cause suffering.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Insight (or wisdom) can only be found within. That is why it is called insight (inside). To find everything you’re looking for in life, you must look inside yourself and discover the wisdom that already exists within you. All the answers lie deep within your soul.
We live in a world of thought, not reality. Sydney Banks once said, “Thought is not reality; yet it is through thought that our realities are created.” Each of us lives through our own perceptions of the world, which are vastly different from the person right next to us.
Reality is that the event happened, with no meaning, thinking, or interpretation of it.
It’s not about the events that happen in our lives, but our interpretation of them, which causes us to feel good or bad about something. This is how people in third world countries can be happier than people in first world countries and people in first world countries can be more miserable than people in third world countries.
Thoughts are not inherently bad. Remember that they are the energetic mental raw materials from which we create in the world. The moment we think about our thoughts is when we begin to get taken on an emotional rollercoaster. When we think about our thoughts, we begin to judge and criticize the thoughts and experience all sorts of internal emotional turmoil.
The only thing that was useful and helpful was the initial thought that popped into your mind when I first asked how much you wanted to make. All of the thinking that happened after was destructive and unhelpful. Thoughts create. Thinking destroys. The reason thinking destroys is because as soon as we begin to think about the thoughts, we cast our own limiting beliefs, judgements, criticisms, programming, and conditioning onto the thought, thinking of infinite reasons as to why we can’t do it and why we can’t have it. Without thinking, we prevent all negative programming and judgements from tarnishing the initial thought of what you want to create.
You can also compare thinking to quicksand. The more that we fight our thinking, the more it amplifies the negative emotions and the worse it gets. The same is true for quicksand. If we’re in quicksand, the way out isn’t to fight it. If we panic and frantically try to fight it, it only makes things worse by tightening the grip it has on us and pulling us under faster. The only way out is to stop struggling and allowing the natural buoyancy of your body to take over to bring you back up to the surface with ease. The only way to break free from our thinking is to let go and trust that our natural inner wisdom will guide us back to clarity and peace like it always has.
If you begin to feel like something’s wrong because you feel way too peaceful and content, know that it’s only your mind trying to make you think again. Your mind is the greatest salesman and knows exactly what to say to get you to bring you back into its vicious cycle of destructive thinking. It is in this moment that you have the choice to have faith in the unknown and stay in the feeling of happiness, peace, and love or to go back to the old patterns of familiar pain and psychological suffering. We can either choose to be free and happy in the unknown or to be confined and suffer in the familiar.