The Human Condition: Lost in thought - STILLNESS SPEAKS, by Eckhart Tolle

Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts.
They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.
In you, as in each human being, there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than thought.
It is the very essence of who you are.
We may call it presence, awareness, the unconditioned consciousness.
In the ancient teachings, it is the Christ within, or your Buddha nature.
Finding that dimension frees you and the world from the suffering you inflict on yourself and others when the mind'made 'little me' is all you know and runs your life.
Love, joy, creative expansion, and lasting inner peace cannot come into your life except through that unconditioned dimension of consciousness.
If you can recognize, even occasionally, the thoughts that go through your mind as simply thoughts, if you can witness your own mental-emotional reactive patterns as they happen, then that dimension is already emerging in you as the awareness in which thoughts and emotions happen - the timeless inner space in which the content of your life unfolds.
The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it.
Every thought pretends that it matters so much.
It wants to draw your attention in completely.
Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.
How easy it is for people to become trapped in their conceptual prisons.
The human mind, in its desire to know, understand, and control, mistakes its opinions and viewpoints for the truth.

It says: this is how it is.
You have to be larger than thought to realize that however you interpret 'your life' or someone else's life or behavior, however you judge any situation, it is no more than a viewpoint, one of may possible perspectives.
It is no more than a bundle of thoughts.
But reality is one unified whole, in which all things are interwoven, where nothing exists in and by itself.
Thinking fragments reality - it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.
The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don't realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are.

The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp.
When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.

The mind exists in a state of 'not enough' and so is always greedy for more.
When you are identified with mind, you get bored and restless easily.
Boredom means the mind is hungry for more stimulus, more food for thought, and its hunger is not being satisfied.

When you feel bored, you can satisfy your mind's hunger by picking up a magazine, making a phone call, swtiching on the TV, surfing the web, going shopping, or - and this is not uncommon - transferring mental sense of lack and its need for more to the body and satisfy it briefly by ingesting more food.

Or you can stay bored and restless and observe what it feels like to be bored and restless.
As you bring awareness to the feeling, there is suddenly some space and stillness around it, as it were.
A little at first, but as the sense of inner space grows, the feeling of boredon will begin to diminish in intensity and significance.
So even boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not.
You discover that a 'bored person' is not who you are.
Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you.
Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person.
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours', not personal.
They are conditions of the human mind.
They come and go.
Nothing that comes and goes is you.
'I am bored.' Who knows this?
'I am angry, sad, afraid.' Who knows this?
You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind.
It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being.
To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

There is an aliveness in you that you can feel with your entire Being, not just in the head.
Every cell is alive in that presence in which you don't need to think.
Yet, in that state, if thought is required for some practical purpose, it is there. The mind can still operate, and it operates beautifully when the greater intelligence that YOU ARE uses it and expresses itself through it.