P.O. Box 2285
Framingham, MA 01703


	Home About Contact

20. Automatic Thinking

Automatic doors in buildings are, in my opinion, more evidence of the overall improvement of civilization. I put them in the second tier of wonders, in with duct tape, tiny tomatoes and Hellmann's mayonnaise. There's a monitor, called a "motion detector", that sees you coming, swooshes open the doors, and in you go. Nice.

I see a parallel in the way we receive information. This combo of Spirit and Body we call a human has a 'motion detector' too. It monitors information (thoughts) coming externally through the senses and internally from our memory. This (continual) bombardment of thoughts is detected even when we are sleeping. Our 'motion detector' should be called an emotion detector because it adds emotion to every thought. Once I understood the power of my emotion detector my auto-doors went right up there (past Hellmann's) to the first tier of wonders.

So the information always comes with feelings. And the feelings can automatically cue a response to the incoming information. In life-threatening situations the response is triggered immediately. When it's not automatic, when there is no crisis, then you have choices to make.

How you evaluate your emotional reactions to your thoughts is critical to your overall happiness. No evaluation of your emotional reactions equals no control at all and chancy happiness at best. That is Automatic Thinking. (Others have called it Reactive thinking.)

Evaluating with your feelings is easier than it sounds because, as a friend of mine (the renowned master psychic/teacher Cheryl Lampshire from Upton, MA) says, "Feelings happily ping on good judgments and thud on bad ones." These invaluable pinging/thudding cues remind me of the clicker the nuns way back in grade school used (to teach us the ritual of Mass) and also the clicker that dog-trainers use nowadays to train puppies.

Feelings can serve you, and serve you well, by helping you to evaluate your incoming information and ergo, your choices. Feelings are an indicator of what your response should be. If you get a ping on your response then it is probably correct. If it thuds then you should re-evaluate your response. Athletes routinely override the thudding 'slow down' or 'stop' emotional feelings when pushing their bodies beyond their body's comfort level. They are exercising their free choice. Anybody's free choice of pinging or thudding responses even extends to those thoughts that well up from one's memory (and those choices can, believe it or not, be actually felt in your body).

I don't have this down cold yet but I've been ruthlessly evaluating my feelings for about a year now. I find, to my surprise, that there's no downside to this evaluating process. I thought continued cold-blooded analysis would turn me into an emotional iceberg. In fact, dancing my little heart out (in a rock & roll saloon) is much freer now that I've re-evaluated and decided that it is appropriate. I've similarly decided that some losses, like the loss of a good friend or pet, are worth a good cry and so I do.

It was scary, in the beginning, to use my feelings because I simply didn't know how. As an artist/designer (retired) I had made my feelings much too important and paid the price of bad choices gladly. What the hell, I thought, no good stuff (strong emotional content) without some bad stuff (depression, fatigue, etc.). I was wrong. There's no good reason for feeling bad except maybe once in a while.

So I started with small things, i.e., clothing choices, dinner choices, autoroutes, etc. listening with my inner ear for that pinging (or thudding). After pinging along for some months I gradually tested larger, more important choices like life-style changes. It worked. My feelings now are about equal weight with my logic and now I'm a much happier bear.

There's an on-off key to this situation but I haven't found it yet and my info-doors, like yours, keep working all the time. The key is around here somewhere and I'll keep meditating on exactly where it is and how to use it. Why? Then I could lock all those doors, get no information, and not have to think at all. You know, just to 'be', maybe 'zone around' from time to time. Not permanently, that would land me in a mountain cave, blissed-out and doing nothing... just from time to time.

<< Back Table of Contents Next >>