It is painful to an inveterate smoker to give up smoking. It is in fact extremely painful, at least for some smokers. I read in the paper that those with a specific gene will find it five times harder to give up smoking, compared to those who don’t have this gene.

Anyway, the first week or two without nicotine feels like a terrible flu. The withdrawal symptoms are peaking on the third day. The inner voice is coming up with amazingly negative ideas. The irritation with other people is unbearable. After the third week things are getting better. However, a deep sadness can linger on for months. A new identity is gradually being formed. The smoker can no longer hang out with his old friends at the pub. He feels like a crayfish. When a crayfish grow he has to shed his old shell and wait under a rock until the new shell is formed. He is loosing all meaning to his life. He is loosing his love of other people. Then, suddenly, he finds himself smoking again."Oh Brother! This is life, isn’t it?"

"How the hell did this happen? Why did I start smoking again? What an idiot I am?"
OK, after a few months of heavy chain smoking and self loathing the smoker realizes again that he has to do something or else he will cough his lungs out. So he stops smoking again and suffers the same ordeal again, for the umpteenth time, deeply convinced that this has to be the last time. However, his life can go on like this for years, back and forth, sometimes a smoker, sometimes a non smoker.

All habits are hard to give up, thinking habits, eating habits, drinking habits
inveterate prejudices, deeply ingrained opinions, selfishness, laziness. A habit is not always a problem, though. To eat, drink and be merry can be wonderful for years but eventually the day will come when some doctor tells you that either you change your lifestyle or you will die.

Selfishness is another vice but it is seldom a problem to the selfish person. It is the people he meets who suffers.

To give up prejudices, ingrained opinions and selfishness is probably the most difficult tasks you will ever have to face in your life. They are impossible to give up, I think. It is not even worth trying. The abandonment of a prejudice or a selfish belief will happen by itself or it won’t happen at all. A deeply ingrained belief or prejudice will not be abandoned, until the believer, at the bottom of his heart, realizes that he has been all wrong.

Yes, it is hard to give up ideas. To some people it is extremely hard. Think of all those who eventually realize that the cult they belong to is destructive and evil
Some people are also born into such cults. They need professional help from mind control experts and therapists to start a new life.

What if all of us need help from mind control experts to start a new life? What if all of us belong to different kind of destructive cults? Isn't this a terrible thought?

Whom do you talk to when you are talking to yourself? Who is this person? Mostly the inner voice is directed to someone else. All of us have imagined discussions in our heads. "When I meet her again I shall tell her that..." It is like a rehearsal. But whom are you talking to when you're talking to yourself? Who is listening to your explanations? Have you figured these things out yet? Is he like a schoolteacher
or is he more like a drunkard on a park bench? Is he like a police officer? Is he like a mafia boss? Do you have to spread yourself thin to please him or is he laid back and relaxed? Is it difficult to get him out of bed in the morning? Is it almost impossible to get him out of his god damn couch in the afternoon? Some people have a good old friend, some people have a sergeant.

Are you proud like a soldier when he is decorated by his imagined general, or do you feel more like a dog? Do you wag your inner tail or do you cringe when your master looks at you?

Of course he can be a she. What if she is like a nasty, judgmental and condescending wife of a millionaire. What if she is like a mother singing to herself in the laundry. What if she is like a prostitute with a serious drug problem? Could it be. that you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick? Maybe it is the police officer who is explaining his take on things to his imagined listers. What a mess!
The inner world is truly chaotic.

What does it feel like, do you think, to be possessed by an evil spirit? Or what does it feel like to be possessed by a stupid spirit or a goofy spirit or a lazy spirit? There are wired spirits, cool, calm and collected spirits, selfish spirits, silly spirits, high spirits, low spirits. There are so many possible spirits to be possessed by, but what does it feel like to not be possessed at all? Would you feel like a horse without a rider? Would you feel like a bird without a cage? Would you feel like a slave without a master? Or would you feel like a dog without a home? Is it like not being hypnotized?

I once worked with a guy who was very selfish. He always tried to shirk the harder work and leave it to someone else. He stole what he could and he was always complaining about everything and everybody. Every now and then he informed us that he regularly sent money to a family in India to help them. "It feels good to help poor people", he explained. His charity was clearly just a way to disguise his selfishness, but I never told him my thoughts about it. Isn’t charity always just a cover for selfishness?

Some folks live pure theoretical life‘s. All they talk about and care about is what they have picked up from books. They have theories about everything. They have theories about how life ought to be lived, the true nature of man, the true nature of the soul, how the society should be organized, how science and religion is related
You name it. They live in a theoretical world

The conflict between Jews and Arabs is owing to the fact that Jews perceive themselves as Jews and Arabs perceive themselves as Arabs. Biologically, or objectively seen, there is no difference between them. They kill each other because they think that they are different and because they believe that different people have to kill each other. They have been seriously deluded.

The same thing happened in Yugoslavia. Croatians, Slovenians, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs believed that they were different even though they spoke the same language
and intermarried each other. The Croatians are Catholics, the Serbs are Greek Orthodox and many Bosnians are Muslims. Is this the reason they had to kill each other so brutally? They turned into something like British soccer hooligans who believe that supporters from other teams have to be fought in the streets, and if possible kicked to death. What magnificently idiotic beliefs!

Well, something similar happened in Rwanda. People had been told that they belonged to different tribes that they were either Hutu or Tutsi, and they believed it.
But the Hutu or Tutsi thing was created by the Belgians in those days when the Belgians ruled in Rwanda. The definition of a Tutsi was a man who was the owner of at least one cow.

Cultural differences are not real. Cultural differences are mind constructs imaginations, delusions, fantasies. They create nothing but war hatred, murder and the death or injury of innocent children. It has to be abandoned.

Four hundred years ago people believed that the sun revolved around the earth and that the earth was the center of the universe. They had to abandon this belief, however, because it was an illusion and they had to abandon the illusion that the Church was infallible. (The Catholic church said that the earth was in the center
and the sun revolved around it. If you had other ideas about it you were sentenced to death.)

Two hundred years ago slavery was accepted. A hundred years ago racism was a mainstream ideology. Today racism and slavery are considered appalling by everyday people. It is the same thing with Cultural differences. They are made of illusions and appalling ideas and they have to be abandoned. A hundred years from now people will not understand how we could think that cultural differences was important.

To be afraid of thoughts is like being afraid of ghosts. But thoughts exist and ghosts don’t. Thoughts are real but ghosts are not. Ghosts exist only as beliefs, or thoughts. Well, in that sense ghosts are real.

The mind made self, the ego, the idea of who you are, is also real, but it is made of thoughts. It is like a ghost, a spirit. Without your thoughts about yourself you are nobody. It is different with the sense perceptions. They are also processed in the brain, but that is not something "you" do. That is something the brain does for you. You can see with your eyes and hear with your ears, you can feel the wind in your face and smell the horse dung from a distance.

What are thoughts made of? Are they made of electricity? Are they made of light? Are they made of chemicals? It doesn't really matter. Thoughts are sometimes interesting, yes but mostly quite annoying. It is better to ignore them. It is better to leave them alone. Treat them like you treat the drunkards at a train station.

But who is this you who treat the thoughts as drunkards? Isn't this "you" also made of something, chemicals or electricity or whatever? Yes, but you didn't create it. The brain creates it for you.

What is waking up in the morning after good nights sleep and what is passing out at night? What is panicking? What is stressed out? What exactly is experiencing peace beyond understanding?