Sit for a minute and try not to think.
You will fail almost immediately. A thought will arrive.
Notice that you did not invite it.
Try again. Decide what the next thought will be.
You cannot.
You can produce a thought on command, but the thought about what to produce arrived without your permission, and the producing produced its own thoughts you did not plan.
The mind that was supposed to be in charge is being run from somewhere it cannot see.
This is the most ordinary fact about your life, and it is the one you have most carefully avoided.
You have been operating on the assumption that you are the author of your thinking. That your beliefs are yours. That your opinions came from you.
Look at where any of them came from.
Your politics arrived through the people you grew up around, the schools you attended, the algorithms you happened to be served, the friends you happened to make. You did not sit down at the start of life and pick.
Your taste in food was assembled from what was put in front of you as a child and the social contexts in which you ate it.
Your sense of what is funny was trained by what made the people around you laugh.
Your worries are mostly the worries of your parents, slightly modified.
You have been calling all of this me.
Try to find the part you actually chose.
Look behind the preference for the chooser of the preference. You will find another preference. Look behind that one. Another.
There is no original choosing self underneath the conditioning.
The conditioning goes all the way down.
This is not depressing. It is freeing, eventually.
But first it is disorienting, and most people back away from it before they get to the freeing part.
Nisargadatta said it like this:
You are not what you take yourself to be.
He said it for forty years, and most people who heard it nodded and went on taking themselves to be what they took themselves to be.
The nodding is the problem. The teaching does not land until you actually look.
Look.
The next thought is about to arrive.
You do not know what it will be about. You will not author it. It will come from a source you cannot locate.
When it arrives, watch what happens.
The thought comes. A small claim follows the thought, saying that was mine. The claim is itself a thought you did not author.
The claimer is another thing being produced.
There is no one in here producing the producing.
This is the recognition.
It can land softly or sharply. For some people it lands as relief, because they finally see they are not responsible for the noise. For some people it lands as fear, because the someone they were hoping to be in charge is being revealed as part of the show.
The fear passes. The relief stays.
You did not choose your thoughts.
You did not choose your reactions. You did not choose your fears. You did not choose your loves.
All of it has been arriving for as long as you have been alive, and you have been calling the arrival me.
When you stop calling it me, the arrival keeps coming.
The thoughts arrive. The reactions arrive. The fears and loves arrive.
Nothing about the content changes.
What changes is that there is no longer someone in the middle of it, exhausted from pretending to be the source.
The exhaustion was never from the thoughts.
The exhaustion was from claiming them.
You are not the author of any of this.
The author was a story the mind kept telling.
Something is reading this sentence. It is not authoring the reading. The reading is happening.
A thought may arrive that says I am the one reading. The thought arrived. The reading was already underway.
You did not choose to be here.
You did not choose to keep going.
You did not choose to read this far.
Something kept the reading going, and it was not the small voice in your head that thinks it is in charge.
That small voice can keep talking.
You no longer have to believe it is the one keeping you alive.
Sources: Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That (1973).