What needs changing in your background thinking?

We have so many different kinds of thoughts going through our minds, and some of them that are on the surface may be there courtesy what I’ll call ‘background thinking’.

Here’s a really simple practical example. I look at the large chocolate eclair and feel like eating it.  The thoughts that come up are things like ‘I deserve a treat’, ‘It will spoil my dinner’, ‘blow the diet’ ‘I want to stick to my diet this time’ ………

Another example would be seeing a young man with a Middle Estern face and a back pack getting into the tube train carriage. ‘Am I safe?’ ‘Should I be concerned?’ ‘That looks heavy.’ ‘He looks like my neighbour.’

These surface thoughts may float across the foreground of consciousness and they may not matter much unless we fasten on them and give particular ones attention and perhaps act on them in some way.

It’s the background thoughts that determine what we single out from the random passing surface thoughts.  

So in the eclair example, if I strengthen my background thinking, for example keeping on reminding myself how I don’t want to eat wheat, cream and sugar because I want to feel really healthy, I can reject foreground thoughts about eating the eclair on the plate in front of me.

In the tube train example, I can strengthen my wish to live in a world where people get on well regardless of racial and religious differences and thus avoid fastening on thoughts that could make me feel frightened or wary of someone I don’t know. In my background thinking I’m already living ‘everyone getting on well’. 

So if your everyday jumble of thoughts keeps coming back to ones you don’t like, for example because they don’t make you feel good or because they might tempt you to do things you don’t want to do, then look in the background thinking. What are the beliefs, ideas, values and unexplored out of date thoughts that might need reviewing and renewing?