Right Understanding -revisited

Buddha, some two thousand six hundred years ago is said to have said that, because you think, you have problems! So, what to do ? Stop thinking? How? Just stop! But thoughts are like a part of of who I am from the day i learned that i could think albeit to tell the difference from hot and cold and ever since the first thought entered my mind thoughts have been like, who I am, or who I try to be or want to become, and it seems i cannot survive without my thought processes even in my sleep i am thinking. The moment i walked out of the house I am bombarded by myriads of thoughts that pops into my head from ever single form i experience just walking to my car and I started cursing and swearing at the motorcycle riders as they try to dash in front on me while i was making a U-Turn. And I am a 'sitter, someone who meditates every chance i get and yet here I am watching my mind infested by incessant intrusions of mental dramas mostly in the forms of vexations.
Can we stop our thinking dual mind from being in the forefront of our every action, every move we make every decision we take every feeling we have? Can we become a non-thinking entity, that is can we act without the presence of a single thought prior or after we have acted like a robot? We do it allot in our daily lives only we do not fully realize it simply because it is not what we are conscious of, we are not conscious of acting spontaneously without thoughts involved most of the time, why? Well for many reasons, one of which is that we have been conditioned throughout our lives that we are a thinking animal. We are different from other animals because we think, we are proud of this fact too! However, the fact that through our ability to think we on the brink of obliterating ourselves is not really an issue with most of us as we go about our daily lives.
The Buddha is his 'Eighth Fold Path' the fourth of his 'Four Noble Truths', the path by which man can liberate himself from the cyclic bondage of 'Birth, Death and Re-Birth' that every man has to endure is said to have said that, first comes 'Right Understanding'.

"RIGHT UNDERSTANDING

The first element of the Eightfold Path is Right Understanding which arises through insights into the first three Noble Truths. If you have these insights, then there is perfect understanding of Dhamma - the understanding that:
‘All that is subject to arising is subject to ceasing.’ It’s as simple as that. You do not have to spend much time reading ‘All that is subject to arising is subject to ceasing’ to understand the words, but it takes quite a while for most of us to really know what the words mean in a profound way rather than just through cerebral understanding.
To use modern colloquial English, insight is really gut knowledge - it’s not just from ideas. It’s no longer, ‘I think I know’, or ‘Oh yes, that seems a reasonable, sensible thing. I agree with that. I like that thought.’ That kind of understanding is still from the brain whereas insight knowledge is profound. It is really known and doubt is no longer a problem."
www.buddhanet.net/4noble22.htm‎

Hence we can deduce that it is really not our having thoughts that is the problem according to the Buddha, it is in how we think. Right Understanding of how we think or why or when is one of the most profound ways of overcoming our ignorance of who we truly are. No doubt we are a thinking animal, with minds and thought processes and this has placed us at an advantage over other creatures in our quest for survival as a specie, however as i said earlier, despite our capabilities to think, we have become the most destructive of God's creatures on this planet. We seemed doom to self annihilate, we seemed doomed to self destruct ourselves and dragging the whole planetary system with us if allowed to do so. We have 'Star wars' before we can even find our ways around outer space, we have inter dimensional conflicts before we even understand how to cross into other parallel dimensions safely and return without harm; thanks to our 'imaginative' but ignorant minds. Why have we as humans evolved into such a negative state of being relatively more so than into a more advanced, peace loving
and enlightened creatures that benefits the whole.

"We are conscious, intelligent beings with retentive memory. We have language. Over the past several thousand years, we have developed reason, logic and discriminative intelligence. What we must do is figure out how to use these capacities as tools for realisation of Dhamma rather than as personal acquisitions or personal problems. People who develop their discriminative intelligence often end up turning it upon themselves; they become very self-critical and even begin to hate themselves. This is because our discriminative faculties tend to focus upon what is wrong with everything. That is what discrimination is about: seeing how this is different from that. When you do that to yourself, what do you end up with? Just a whole list of flaws and faults that make you sound absolutely hopeless."
www.buddhanet.net/4noble22.htm‎

Hence having awakened to a realization of our primordial ignorance we can surmise that we are basically self serving, self centered, egotistical creatures that feeds upon itself inorder  that we may feel we are alive. Everything we do or encounter is about us, every episode that happens positive or negative has to do with how we see the world or it sees us. We are myopic creatures that feel the threat of change as a personal threat, the effect of climatic conditions as our responsible, we feel we are the cause of and the effect of everything that goes on in and around us personally. This personality conflict has become endemic among those who crave for power and wealth and those who feel threatened by any new changes in a society. This is living in an egoic dominated world as Eckhart Tolle has pointed out in his works.

"We are conscious, intelligent beings with retentive memory. We have language. Over the past several thousand years, we have developed reason, logic and discriminative intelligence. What we must do is figure out how to use these capacities as tools for realisation of Dhamma rather than as personal acquisitions or personal problems. People who develop their discriminative intelligence often end up turning it upon themselves; they become very self-critical and even begin to hate themselves. This is because our discriminative faculties tend to focus upon what is wrong with everything. That is what discrimination is about: seeing how this is different from that. When you do that to yourself, what do you end up with? Just a whole list of flaws and faults that make you sound absolutely hopeless."
                                                                                                              www.buddhanet.net/4noble22.htm‎