Everyone should try to put a magnifying glass up to their thoughts. I realize that one of the things that you need to develop when you have an anxious thought is a defense system against negative thoughts to keep you from feeling anxious. You have to have sort of a counter negativity, and that is what keeps you from the long drives of higher negativity.
But the interesting thing is that it’s not a linear path with negativity, you don’t just counter a thought with a positive thought and then it goes away. There’s many tricks and dimensions with negativity that it plays on you. When you start focusing on one thought trying to counter it, you realize that the act of thinking about the thought is a thought itself. Then you realize that the more you think, there’s a never ending chain of thoughts related to the thought you’re thinking. So only way to not think of this meta chain is to stop thinking about your thoughts.
The more you start trying to realize everything the more magnified and intense your consciousness has to work to start realizing all of these thoughts, as if realizing everything that is happening all at once will somehow set you free from all of the struggles of the world all at once. However this method of thinking is only the key to madness. Perhaps that is what true madness is, is trying to analyze everything and give it an absolute meaning, when really all you are doing is creating another thought.
Then you listen to Jimi Hendrix and he says “hang on and don’t think about bad things”, you realize that wherever you take your mind is where you lead it. If you think down in the dumps then that is where your mind will take you. But if you take Jimi Hendrix advice and you fly on the back of a dragonfly and don’t think about bad things, then that is where it will take you. But the thing is, it’s like there’s a second person inside of you who you have to convince to follow your thoughts, because there’s not a complete control over one’s mind. That person has to be persuaded.
For every thought that you do control of, there is an alter thought. I think it is very likely that emotions are like an alter consciousness, the shadow of your thinking consciousness which gives you the illusion of will. You have to listen to what the emotions want and then give it something with your intellect. It is always this back and forth, but really the emotions are just a petulant child, never satisfied.
But if it is like child, then it is not a matter of keeping the happy, you are the kid. You have to keep yourself happy. It's like having a kid but also being the kid. Having to look after yourself, perhaps you have to be the parent that your parents instilled in you, or however close an approximation to such a feet.
When you’re a little kid, until you have a negative experience with the world, you just expect that the world will be friendly to you. If a little kid is upset by the world then it means that the world must have hurt them in some way. Then the kid just starts to expect that the world will be shitty like that, to the point where every slight thing that happens seems like the onset of madness, whether paranoia that something will happen outside of your control or fear of madness. Really it is just the child who was taught to fear the world and to fear their own consciousness.
But also the people around you are like a reflection of your own consciousness, because you would not know yourself if you did not know the world around you. Emmanuel Kant would say that you need to experience the world through the senses, and you would not know yourself if you did not know the a-priori concepts of time and space, because you are embodied in time and space. You would not know that you are conscious without another person to let you know that you are an individual being.
What relationship you embody with those outside of you is analogous to the relationship you form with their reflection inside of you. The reflection of those outside of you has formed how you treat the inside of yourself and subsequently the reflection the perceived person inside of you. If you attack another you are attacking a reflection of that other person that you have projected inside of yourself, based on how that other person treated you. They are just another thought that you have constructed, and so are you.
As a matter of fact, the consciousness could not have know anything if it were trapped in a world where it cannot experience space and time, it would have no concept of itself if it did not have the reflections of which to project back onto the world. Just as your eyes take in light, your brain projects the world back onto your mind, as if it were out there in front of you. Everything appears to expand outward in front of you, but really it is a projection that is condensed inside of your head.
This is what happens when you start to realize things.