Translation. Get off social media, stop watching the news, stop watching TV and stop repeating the same stupid thoughts you had yesterday. You can stop reading now.

Charles Francis Haanel (May 22, 1866 – November 27, 1949). The dude died 75 years ago long before the deluge, shit show, or flood of negative information we are bombarded with today. But even with millions less pieces of information bombarding us he made that profound observation.

To be clear the majority of our stinkin thinkin is self created. We have approximately 60,000 thoughts a day I am sure it hasnt changed even going back to when he wrote this. We are a prey animal hardwired to survive. We are not a polar bear, a black bear or a dinosaur. We were prey, not predator, during our formative years. Our formative years were a few million years ago, when we were not running around with guns and we were not the master of the universe. That is when our hard wiring happened. Your grandparents and the thousands of generations that preceded you would not have survived if they werent hard wired to notice every possible danger. So there is a reason why your brain just keeps repeating negative thoughts and fears all day long.

Keep that idea in mind, that we are hard wired to survive. Lets assume our brains are similar in structure to a computer, in the sense that we have hardware and software. So our hardware is always going to notice challenges, fears, and things to worry about so we can survive. So for starters 80% of our 60,000 thoughts a day or 45,000 thoughts are negative. We also know that most of our thoughts are repetitive. So for a base line, we are starting out with 45,000 negative thoughts. Add to that about 10,000 ads a day.

I havent even gotten to the news. Think about this. 100 years ago if there was peace in your village or town, how nice that was. Today if there is even one child dying or people dying anywhere on the planet, someone’s cell phone probably captured it and its going to be sitting in your feed, whether that is facebook, instagram, twitter or just plain old news. So if you have any empathy whatsoever its not easy to maintain equanimity.

Today we need to add, according to Nielson, that we are spending 11 hours a day on “gadgets”. Are you starting to see a “problem” or a challenge here.

I also see a phenomenal opportunity. Assuming you are reading this, you havent killed yourself, even though you are ingesting 50,000 to 100,000 pieces of shit every day. Imagine what could happen, if you use the 11 hours a day on your gadgets to absorb positive information or learning.

What about if you let go of the 60,000 repetitive thoughts? What about if you avoided social media? How about being at peace?

I can tell you for a fact, that if you let go of it all, magic happens. Its been happening for about a year now. And there are higher and higher plains that we can arrive to. If you let go of your repetitive thoughts you can actually be creative. As recently as last week I had a day with no repetitive thoughts. And almost every day is peaceful if not blissful, even though my logistical challenges today are the worst in my life.

Here is how I did it. I am going to assume anyone reading this has meditated. So you know how that works. If a thought pops into your meditation you simply let it pass. So for the day, and it was Saturday, I challenged myself to let any thought I have even had before, to just pass, just like I was meditating, even though I was awake, and being and doing. It was an amazing day. There was so much opportunity to be creative in my day. I did have to promise myself that certain worries or things I needed to take care of, I would address later that night, at 7pm, to give my brain the peace it needed to keep releasing what was passing through my mind. But life gets pretty amazing when your brain is not engaged in simply chewing on a chew toy, as I gave as an analogy in a previous post.

Also, I know, I cant just say, let go of whatever you are thinking. I have done the Sedona method for decades and used at least a half a dozen methods to let go of various thoughts and feelings. I couldnt recommend it more. But whatever method you choose to use, if you can just not spend your days absorbing 11 hours of BS TV, news, social media and other crap, you just might be the next Einstein. You have no idea what your brain can create if you allow it to create vs ruminate, repeat and worry.

Its a beautiful life. You just need to clear the shit out of the way. Once again I probably should have led with a pile of shit as my featured image. You cant expect to have happy thoughts when all you do is feed your brain shit sandwiches all day long. At least the shit is smiling.