This is a metaphor to help understand THOUGHT.

EXPLANATION

• Imagine you are in a Sushi bar where the dishes come out on a conveyer belt.

• Initially you have no say over what’s coming out and you just grab the dishes based on what looks interesting, what you know you’ve had before, what you fancy. Some dishes you leave and they just go by.

• The dishes are just like our thoughts. We don’t create them or control what comes out, but we do pick some thoughts up and let other thoughts go by.

• Sometimes habit kicks in and you keep taking a dish that you always have, and it takes a while to realise you actually don’t want it and can stop picking it up.

• Sometimes there’s a flurry of the same dishes, but you can just wait until something else comes out.

• Some dishes go round and round, but if you didn’t want it first time round, you probably don’t after it’s circulated a few times!

We do seem to have some agency in this process.

Just as in a restaurant, the chef will keep putting out popular dishes, so if you keep taking certain dishes they will put more of those out! They don’t mind what you’re eating. And if you stop taking the dishes eventually they will produce less of them.

So… your mind gives you more of what you look for, so if you stop paying attention to certain thoughts, eventually you will get less of them.

LINK – Thought is a constant stream over which we have little control, but freedom to engage. We don’t have to take every dish on the sushi train and neither do we have to take every thought seriously.