Matthew Ferry's Blog

If you pay attention to your mind, you’ll see that it is always judging, assessing, evaluating, quantifying, and categorizing everything. And it’s doing that because it wants to keep you safe. If you listen to all of that talking in your mind, the drunk monkey, you’ll see that what it’s trying to do is figure out what’s going on out there in the world. The drunk monkey wants you to go towards things that are pleasurable, and away from things that will be negative or potentially dangerous.

The problem is that we actually believe that the mind is reality. It’s not. The mind has no idea what reality is. Often, your expectations of reality are broken. Why? Because you premeditated that life would be one way, and it turned out another way. That is the source of most of your suffering.

They key for you is to stop believing what the mind has to say. Start noticing that it has a job, biological function, similar to your bowels. Your bowels are processing waste, and excreting it out of the body. Your mind is observing what’s going on in the world, and identifying potential threats, and moving towards pleasurable things.

That’s the mind’s job. That’s what it’s doing. But that’s not the truth. And if you put all of your reality, all of your life, all of your world into your thoughts, you’re going to be miserable. You need to learn to move beyond your thoughts.