Tuning in to Inner Peace: The Surprisingly Fun Way to Transform Your Life by Joan M Gregerson Read Free Book Online Page A

is to get to a point where you can readily identify and seek help for areas of weakness, as you would for a friend.
     

 
     
     

     

 
     
     
     
     

     

11 Thinking Is Limited
     
    Don’t confuse words with the truth. It’s like confusing a map with the earth. Words are a map. The truth is the ground we are standing on, that always supports us fully. And the truth is love.
     
    It was during a meditation class that I first heard the concept, “Thinking is limited.” It hit me as both impossible and obvious, throwing my mind (thinking!) into immediate gridlock. I was 47 years old at that time. In the meditation class I was taking, they went on to teach about “thoughtless awareness”, and how to trust this over rational thinking alone.
     
    Blasphemy, I thought! But, in the coming days, dozens of examples of exactly this principle flooded my mind.
     
    I studied engineering in college. Engineering is nothing, if not thinking. I took semester after semester crammed with various math and science classes. As the coursework progressed, I knew less and less what it all meant. “If a 5-volt DC power source is located at grid location x1,y5 and a 87 v, 60Hz AC power source is located at x3, y4, what is the strength of the field at x1,y1?”A question like this would take me a few pages of equations to get the answer. I was happy to get the right number, but had no sense of what the heck we were doing or why.
     
    But, class after class, I honed my thinking skills so I could get the right answer, more often than not. And over time, I figured out how to do it with less and less effort. As long as I ignored the feelings of discomfort about not understanding, I was okay. Using this strategy, I succeeded and graduated from college.
     
    I worked in various engineering positions. At one point, I was doing research and writing. In that position, I was tasked with identifying the advantages and disadvantages of new energy-efficient technologies. My job was to complete a 20 to 40-page report complete with dozens of footnotes. That’s what it looked like from the outside.
     
    From the inside, though, it was a mess. I often took on subjects I had no background in, so learned as I went. I would do research, interview some folks, work with my editor and cobble together a draft. I’d then send that out for review. My reviewers all had their own take on reality, as product manufacturers, users or program managers. What followed would be trying to wade through their written comments and long telephone conversations trying to get to my version of ‘truth’.
     
    And at times, things got really contentious and crazy. At that time, I thought that the only way to solve things was more writing and talking. Sometimes, that really did make things worse. Seemingly minor issues would spiral into big issues, with no apparent logical basis. I would find myself in heated discussions but not understand why the heck we weren’t cool.
     
    I knew in my gut that there was something else happening on some other level. But, engineers aren’t known as the touchy-feely type so if there was another level, we were not going to let on.
     
    So, like a blind juggler, I would toss around knives, oranges, and watermelons until I got cut or tired. And I would call my report ‘done’.
     
    Not once did “thinking is limited” or “thoughtless awareness” ever come up.
     
     
    Allowing Solutions to Show Up
    I had heard in our meditation class that Einstein had a sudden flash of inspiration one day when he was outside playing with bubbles. He often advised that to figure something out, you had to stop consciously thinking about it and let the answer come to you.
     
    A few weeks later, I’d been working on a database project for work. It was almost ready to go, except there was one sticky point that I couldn’t resolve. I’d called tech support and talked about it a few times. I’d tried a few workarounds but couldn’t solve it. It was urgent