From Sam Harris
Thinking is indispensable to us, but that being said we're usually thinking without knowing that we're thinking (on the order of something like 99.9% of the time).
And this automaticity is kind of the way we do everything, it's like the very fabric of our experience.
It's distorting our lives and our emotions, it engineers our unhappiness in every moment because most of what we think is quite unpleasant. We're judging ourselves, we're judging others, we're worrying about the future, we're regretting the past, we're at war with our experience (in subtle or course ways) and much of this self talk is unpleasant and diminishing our happiness in every moment.
And so meditation is a tool for cutting through that. It's interrupting this continuous conversation that we are having with ourselves.
Then there's things that we DON'T NOTICE when we're lost in thought -- for instance,
EVERY experience & emotion ISN'T here anymore.
It arises and it passes away.
If it comes back in the present moment by virtue of your thinking about it, it'll subside again when you are no longer thinking about it.
This is something people tend not to notice because rather than merely feel an emotion, we spend our time thinking about all the reasons why we have the right to feel the way we do (or thinking about all the things justify the feeling.)
The conversation keeps this emotion in play for much, much longer than its natural half-life.
And if you are able, through mindfulness, to interrupt this conversation, and simply witness the feeling as it arises, you'll find that you can't maintain it for more than a few moments at a time.
If you think you can feel something for a day, or even an hour, without continually manufacturing it by thinking without knowing that you're thinking, then you are mistaken.
And this is something that you can just witness for yourself: This is the objective truth about the nature of experience and it's testable with a little mindfulness.
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