Ten Insights from "Don't Believe Everything You Think"

Life is a symphony, and we are the conductors

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I just finished the book by Josh Nguyen called Don't Believe Everything You Think, and I was blown away by its insights.

It was a short book, around 100 pages, and it was an easy read. I'm starting to realize that, even though the truth can have many faces, it's still delivering the same message: truth.

The lessons I received from the book were insights I was already experiencing in other facets of life, as I documented in my hundred-day unorthodoxy challenge.

This post isn't necessarily a book review but expands on the profound wisdom I found. To have those similar insights, I recommend reading the book alongside the articles I reference throughout this article. 

The ten insights I found live transforming are as follows:

1. Clarity is our natural state of being

2. We don't have much clarity in our day-to-day mental space

3. The difference between thoughts versus thinking

4. The voices in our heads

5. Separation from God when we think

6. Staying in the here and now. You know what to do

7. Seeing time from a new perspective

8. Trust in the realm of the unknown realm of possibilities

9. There are no wrong keys on the piano

10. We don't live in reality. We live in a perception of reality.

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1. Clarity is our natural state of being.

This statement might've been the most significant insight for me. At our baseline, the natural default state of our mind should be one of clarity. We should be operating from a mental space of peace, love, and understanding because these are traits of clarity.

The biggest reason this was so profound to me was that I had to take a step back and realize that if my natural baseline is supposed to be clarity, without confusion or anxiety, why don't I spend much time in a clear mental space of thinking?

2. We don't have much clarity in our day-to-day mental space.

After the first few chapters, I started to evaluate my thoughts and realized that I didn't have much clarity in my mental space.

This realization was a concept I explored in my article, The Tyrant King, and I wanted to understand why my thoughts were always racing. This yearning inspired me to take a deeper look at society, which I detail in my article our ocularcentric society.

But the one thing that was very insightful to my mental space was learning the difference between thoughts and thinking. In this sense of the word, described in the following insight, thinking is unnatural and a result of our ocularcentric society. The act of disembodiment is why we don't have much clarity in our mental space.

Once I learned how to differentiate thoughts from thinking, I can now look to better myself.

3. Thoughts vs. Thinking

In the book, thoughts are described as nouns. Thoughts are things. They're there. When we look at the thoughts in our heads, they come, pop, and they're gone.

Thinking is described as a verb. It's doing. You don't have "thinks" in your head; you are thinking. It's an active process.

This insight was very transformative because once you know the difference between thinking and thoughts, you start to get a better picture of that natural, inner, divine voice within you and those external voices that have found their way into your psyche.

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4. The voices in our heads.

I realize that we've lost how to listen to ourselves. We don't know what we sound like and think every thought in our head is ours. I explain in my article the power of the mind and the soul that soars.

By knowing how to differentiate between our thoughts, which are divine, and our thinking, which is a result of our ego, we can get a better picture of what is what.

Thoughts, which are natural, come from that place of peace, love, and understanding, and they have these feelings associated with them. Thoughts bring clarity.

Thinking, on the other hand, places us in a fight-or-flight mindset. We have anxiety; we begin to overthink and hyper-think and become over-analytical.

Thinking brings those feelings of anxiety, flustered, pressure, and racing to the point of being a hypochondriac. These feelings aren't natural, and your feelings are a vital indicator of if that entity in your mental space, your thoughts, or your thinking of thoughts, is truly yours.

We can be divinely inspired from inside or externally illusioned due to the results of our ocularcentric molded society. As the father of public relations mentioned, we have ideas suggested by men we've never heard of.

5. Separation from God in Thinking

Within the book, there's a passage that reads that the ancients viewed separation from God as anxiety, suffering, and agony. If we apply this analogy to our psyche, the ancients will say that we were in hell whenever we felt suffering, fear, anxiety, and agony.

Our being in hell let us know we are not aligned with the divine. When we engage in thinking, we actively separate ourselves from the source and begin to walk through life alone. It's no surprise that we see neuroses and psychoses rise as more people report feeling alone in society. We're experiencing a literal hell because we're thinking, and as the ancient said, we're separated from the divine or God.

This insight was powerful, and so was the solution.

6. Staying in the here and now. You know what to do.

For us to return to our natural state of clarity and peace, love and joy, we must stop thinking. Those negative thoughts begin to dissipate when we become aware of our thinking and know where our thinking comes from. And there are two things that we usually think about: the past and the future.

Joshua states the divine source is never in the past or the future; the divine source is in the now. Right here, right now, is where the Divine is, and by bringing our minds to the present, we can reconnect to the divine and return to our natural state.

One of the pieces that I mentioned in the ocular society is how our screen devices have taken our minds out of our bodies and placed them elsewhere.

This process is similar to 200 years ago when we had the traveling circus with the gypsies and the magicians. The magicians would distract the audience with their trickery, pulling the audience's mind to whatever they chose.

These traveling circuses would have a hall of illusions, ancient relics, and items from the future. This circus was the entertainment of sorts, the entrapment of the mind, 200 years ago.

It captured the public; it deceived the public. But eventually, the traveling circus would leave town.

In our current society, we visit the traveling circus daily. This transference of the mind, the process of disembodiment, occurs hourly. Back then, you went to the show; you were disembodied, and the illusionist would take your mind elsewhere. In today's society, our minds are taken elsewhere all the time.

To combat this disembodiment, we must attempt to stay in the present, and we do this by relying on intuition. Intuition is when we just know what to do. Intuition is also known as the gnosis, that divine knowledge.

By being in the present and bringing our minds into our bodies, the answers to whatever we're facing just pop, like the divine thoughts and downloads they are.

And we know that they're divine, or natural, thanks to the peace and understanding that comes with them.

7. Seeing time from a new perspective

I realize that I would spend a lot of time in these over-analytical scenarios in my head. I explore this in my unorthodoxy hundred-day challenge.

I soon noticed that time was passing me by while I was thinking. So, I started to look at time from a new perspective. I realize that we have 60 seconds in a minute, but we also have, on average, 60 heartbeats in a minute.

This concept is reminiscent of my article on fear and death. It makes all the difference when we start looking at time as a measurement of our life. I also realized that our perspective of time was old, which reminded me of the Roman dynasty. Our days are pagan in origin, and possibly our time could also be.

It made me ponder that if those indigenous cultures didn't have this Roman, Latin system of time, how did they view the world? How did they view reality? Was a day simply a day, and if you don't know if today's Tuesday or Thursday, was the day simply a day? Do concepts like the weekend, where we're weakened from five days of work, seem relevant?

To make myself more aware, I started to ask myself, do I want to spend the next 60 heartbeats I have in hell when I'm thinking? Or should I trust my intuition and intelligence by staying in the present?

8. Trust in the unknown realm of possibilities.

We spend so much time thinking that it has become our "new normal." This panic-driven, anxiety-lazed, thought-raising spectrum is what we consider normal because this is the society that we live in.

However, this is not normal, and it's not natural, and we need to natural inner, in the present, peaceful voice, is unknown simply because we know anxiety.

Since it's unknown, our minds don't want to go towards that natural route, which is why we always revert to thinking and agony because this is our normal, albeit false normal. Here is where the concept of faith comes in, which I described in my challenge. You must know your intuition is moving in the right direction and will lead you where you need to go.

And we access that intuition by stopping thinking, being present in the moment, and listening for those intuitive thoughts that drop into our soul with peace, love, and understanding.

I've learned that we have to make space to receive these thoughts. To do this, we must stay in the present, being embodied and removing information that comes to take our minds elsewhere. By doing this, we can receive insightful and thoughtful downloads that can have profound effects on our lives.

9. There are no wrong keys on the piano.

One way we can reduce the amount of overthinking and the pressure that leads to overthinking is by looking at our life as a piano. There are 88 keys on a piano, and you cannot say there's a wrong or bad key on the piano - it just may be played out of place. This piano analogy is an excellent metaphor for our life. There are no good or bad choices—just decisions, just "piano keys."

By listening to our intuition, we can play our life's piano to the best of naturally inspired knowledge of what we should do in everyday situations. By trusting in our decisions, knowing there is no wrong or right decision, but being naturally led, we begin to see this wonderful masterpiece unravel in front of our eyes.

A lesson I learned from the book Thinking Fast and Slow, ultimately comes down to judging your decision based on how you made it, not how it turned out.

If we make our decisions from a place of peace, love, understanding, and clarity, we begin to see reality from a different perspective.

10. We live in a perception of reality.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. What makes us suffer is our thinking of our experiences.

We can view them in a thinking way, and from that perspective, we have all the symptoms that come with them, such as the pain, the agony, the hell. Or we can view them from that thoughtful view and see how experiences and events are opportunities for us to grow, learn from, and explore this life journey.

This understanding ultimately comes down to the fact that we do not live in reality but in a perception of reality. This ethos is the core of my upcoming book, An Unorthodox Truth.

Once we know our reality for what it is, we can change our perspective on reality. By understanding the difference between thoughts and thinking and where thinking comes from, we remove the illusion of reality.

Once we understand the difference between thoughts and thinking, the difference between our divine thoughts and egotistical thinking, we change our perception of reality.

Conclusion and Call To Action

Those are the tenants that I got from the book. Strongly recommend reading it because it's a short read. I also recommend reading my article on the ocularcentric society so that you know how the elite gave us our thinking perspective.

We must understand the hows and the whys of this labyrinth we currently inhabit. If this article provided you with some insights, please share this with someone to encourage dialogue and intellectual conversations.

We need to be more insightful, more intelligent, and more thoughtful as a culture, and it all starts once we stop believing everything we think.

Questions to reflect on

1) Would you say that most of your time is spent thinking fast, racing thoughts? Anxious, flustered thoughts that place you in a state of fight-or-flight?

2) How much time in your day do you spend in clarity? Our natural default state of peace, love, and understanding?

3) Do you understand how our ego, the Tyrant King, leads to these compulsive, reactionary thoughts that tie up our mental energy?

4) What can you do today to stop thinking negative thoughts and start experiencing and receiving insightful genius-driven thoughts?

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Learn to connect with yourself in a deep and meaningful way to de-stress, find clarity, and experience ease. Take our 5 Days of YOU Challenge today.

Each day you'll get a short video and simple exercise to help explore YOU.

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Author’s Bio

Franklin O'Kanu runs the Substack publicationUnorthodoxy, which covers topics dealing with business development, psychology, ancient philosophy, politics, the metaphysical, esoteric, and spiritual.

Learn more about Franklin and Unorthodoxy here.