Every moment’s experience of an object will come with a feeling tone, whether or not this feeling is accessed by conscious awareness. In response to a feeling of pleasure or pain, an emotional response or attitude of liking or not liking the object may also arise. Most of us conflate these two experiences much of the time, concluding that a particular object is liked or disliked. However, in fact the object is merely experienced, and the liking or disliking of it is something added by our psychological response to it. This difference is a subtle but important nuance… It is the difference between “I am an unworthy person” and “I am a person who is feeling unworthy just now.”
Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind
We can see the mind as like a room. The things and people in the room are like the thoughts, the mental objects. We can think, ‘I like this one, and I don’t like this one, and this one’s okay.’ We can be very busy sorting out which thoughts we like and which thoughts we don’t like, but have you noticed something else about the room? What else is in it? Space… So instead of focusing on the objects, we can focus on the space around them. Sometimes when there is a lot of thinking, all we can see is the thinking; it is as though it occupies the whole mind. But there is a way of recognising that the mind is much bigger than the thinking. Instead of focusing on the thought, we can focus on the space around the thought. If we have a very strong emotion like anger or grief, we can start thinking about it and wondering what to do about
The important thing is not
