Thinking meditation

In most forms of meditation, you have to learn to let thoughts come and go. They are like cars passing by in the street outside. They are nothing to pay attention to. You notice them and then continue with your practice.

Another way of dealing with thoughts is to listen to them carefully. What is going on here? How can my brain produce so much crap, nonsense, and nasty stuff? How can I be so grumpy, small-minded, petty, and stupid? I want to be a good person.

So, because you don't want to listen to all this BS, you turn on the internet on your mobile phone or your TV set. If you are driving a car, you will probably turn on the radio. I have used this strategy all my life, and it works quite well. I don't want to hear all the stupid shit my mind produces.

However, if you continue listening to your mind a little longer, you can learn more about yourself. You can also challenge yourself, your ideas, beliefs about the world, lies, pretexts, justifications, rationalizations, and spinning. You can discover that you also have genuinely warm and not stupid thoughts. You can find that you don't have just two voices inside your head, one good and one bad. Moreover, you can also discover that one part of you is observing the internal debates.

This is thinking meditation.  

Miracles

Brain scientists and Buddhists claim that the sense of self, the ego, is an illusion. But isn't the world itself an illusion? Isn't the world as we know it created in the brain? Your eyes detect light waves and convert them into nerve impulses that are transported to the brain, where an edited video is formed. But this is not the reality—it's just an edited tiny fraction of it. As Kant said, what you experience is not the reality itself but the reality for you.

What would the world look like if no one was there who could perceive it? More than 99% of an atom consists of space between the nucleus and the electrons. According to the physicists, "the real world" is an endless empty space with a few elementary particles here and there bouncing about.

Are synchronicities, ESP, and miracles real, or are they delusions? Isn't everything a miracle? The more you learn about life and how a living cell and living organisms are constructed, the more astonished you will become.

So, you conclude there must be a superior intelligence behind it all, and you become religious. You become a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu, or something New Agey. This is a mistake, I think. You don't need all the junk that comes with religion to marvel at the great mystery.