Question What You Think

In winter 2022, self-help author Joseph Nguyen released, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking is the Beginning & End of Suffering.” He offered readers ways to deal with anxiety, self-doubt and negative thoughts—emotions that afflict us all.

Just the first part of that title, “don’t believe everything you think,” seemed to speak to an era of social abandon wrought by vast technological changes, from AI to hyper social media.

When our children were in those growing years of confusion and anxiety (made even more so by social media), we used this aphorism – we still do, even to remind ourselves – to help them try and see things more clearly.

We wanted to free them to question what they think, but also what they read, hear, watch and are told, which, admittedly, when a parent is doing the telling requires patience at times.

To be sure, I have not read Nguyen’s book (only just learned of it, in fact), nor am I trying to shill for him, but I am using him to make a point in this essay.

I went to Nguyen’s website to learn whether my interpretation of “don’t believe everything you think” aligned with his. It did and more.

His opening chapter quotes Canadian philosopher Matshona Dhliwayo: “One who looks around him is intelligent, one who looks within him is wise.” Self-help writer Sydney Banks, “Thought is not reality; yet it is through thought that our realities are created,” starts the chapter.

Banks, a welder with a ninth-grade education who died in 2009, developed a “Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought” philosophy practiced today by mental health counselors and therapists.

In one of his lectures, Banks recounts explaining his insecurities to a therapist who told him his troubles were rubbish.

“What I heard was, there’s no such thing as insecurity, it’s only thought. All my insecurity was only my own thoughts! … It was so enlightening!”

A passage in Nguyen’s book seems to speak to what Americans grapple with today:

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. Our feelings do not come from external events, but from our own thinking about the events.

Despite the technological advances to inform, learn and communicate, many Americans seem to live in dread – of the world, their country, their community, a neighbor, a relative – instead of examining why they feel this way.

As if they fear enlightenment or prefer to be fearful.

Q Anon followers strike me as a group that believes everything they think, as do the thousands of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Enlightenment can alter, sometimes significantly, narratives of what you believe or what you think you believe, but you have to open yourself to being enlightened.

Some claim enlightenment when their preferences in media, political party, politician, celebrity, “influencer,” religious figure, billionaire, etc. confirms what they think. That’s confirmation bias, not greater knowledge or insight that true enlightenment provides.

It is difficult, but not impossible, to change a viewpoint or thinking on which you’ve established a worldview of yourself and others. But just as Banks realized his insecurities are only thoughts, it is freeing to see new perspectives.

Then you realize, there isn’t as much to fear as there is to learn.

Pictured: Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker."