Often we are caught in upside-down thinking. Our greatest challenge is that we don’t recognize it as being upside down. We think we are right. We think our perceptions and thoughts are accurate. They are not. Medieval man thought the world was flat, but it did not make it flat. We could say they had wrong view and wrong thought.

Here are some suggestions for ways to prevent upside-down thinking, or wrong thought:

These practices are supportive in keeping you on track daily. Think of it as a spiritual diet. Feeding your soul is equally as important as feeding your body.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We become what we think about all day long.” Be ever mindful of what your thoughts beneath your thoughts might be. Think in accord with that which is spiritually true, good, kind, helpful, loving.

In order to have Right Thinking we must have it in the foundation of Right View. Our minds must be constantly trained and every thought mindfully witnessed in order to move into Right View.

Our thinking is constantly creating our reality. The easiest way to observe your past thinking is to look at what is present in your life today. Whatever it may be is a certain indicator of where your thinking has been.

In Buddhism there are three practices that instruct us in Right Thought that are very helpful in creating a calm mind:

First: There is a practice to frequently ask yourself, “Are you sure?” Are you sure your thinking about a person or a situation is accurate? Or is it just a story you are telling yourself? This humorous story illustrates the point.

After several years of observing him do it, a woman in my congregation asked me why it was my husband, David, left the 9 A.M. service immediately preceding the offering. For years she had thought he left at that moment as some sort of cosmic act not to be in the sanctuary when the tithes and offerings were being given and received. Her thinking told her something to the effect that he did not feel it was appropriate for the minister’s husband to be in the room during that part of the service. In actuality he always left the service at that point to go to another part of the building to be on time to facilitate a Course in Miracles study group. Her perception was essentially a story she had made up.

When she revealed to me what her self-talk story had convinced her was true, I burst out laughing. I dropped my usually unflappable platform, ministerial persona and laughed heartily. It was slightly embarrassing. She had been attending only the 9 A.M. service for years. If she had attended the 11 A.M. service, she would have observed David staying through the offering and even giving his weekly tithe.

Are you sure about what you are sure about?

To help bring clarity to your mind by asking, “Are you sure?” I suggest creating several flash cards containing only those words written in bold script in your own handwriting. Place them where they will be most frequently seen: in your journal, taped to mirrors in your home, on the dashboard of your car, at your desk, at your computer. Place at least four or five around your environment.

Our thinking can be far off the mark, and we can be so out of touch. We can use Right View by asking, “Are you sure?” This is a place to begin to right our thinking.

Second: Ask, “What am I doing?” or, as Dr. Phil of TV fame so perfectly asks in response to people’s outlandish behavior, “What were you thinking?” When you create needless stress, ask: “What am I doing?” When you are anxious, ask: “What am I doing?” When you feel anger rising, ask: “What am I doing?” When you speak unkindly of another, ask: “What am I doing?” When you harbor ill feelings or resentments, ask: “What am I doing?” When you water seeds of negativity, ask: “What am I doing?” When you are racing through your life or through a simple task, ask: “What am I doing?” When your cosmic plate has become a platter and is overflowing, ask, “What am I doing?”

In the 1960s Ram Dass popularized the phrase “Be here now.” These concepts lead to self-awakening and bring us fully into the present moment, which is the only place we can know the truth. When we are swept up in the trauma of life, living with unskilled rather than skilled behavior, it is good to stop and ask ourselves, “What am I doing?” When anger rises in us, let us ask, “What am I doing?” Whenever we feel victimized, ask, “What am I doing?”

We are such habitual creatures, we repeat a habit, energy, an attitude, a behavior without much forethought. We need to be aware when we are doing this, and one way to do this is to say to ourselves, “Hello, habit energy.” We can then begin to notice our habitual, compulsive, ceaseless thoughts. Sometimes it is simply a habit to worry or to be distracted. If at these moments we can pause, recognize the habitual behaviors and greet them, we can begin to learn to get past them.

Third: Ask, “Is this helpful?” This is a phrase I resonated toward when I first heard it. It is like a reality barometer. Is this gossiping conversation helpful? Is this attitude helpful? Is this prejudice helpful? Is this fear helpful? Is this anger helpful? Is this guilt helpful? Is this long-held belief helpful? Is holding family secrets helpful?

We all can carry hidden beliefs—attitudes based on fear and negative programming from our family, culture and society that keep us separated from one another. These beliefs keep us asleep.

Is this helpful? This simple, clear question is a way to assist us living mindfully. In the moment-by-moment living of our lives, this question is a simple way to explore our thoughts, beliefs and attitudes. This leads to our healing, to our becoming a more whole, aware human being, to becoming a person living out of an attitude of loving kindness, rather than living from hate, fear and prejudice.

A word I fell in love with in my earliest years of studying Buddhism was “bodhichitta.” Bodhichitta is the manifestation of compassion, grace, love and goodness, all rolled up together. When we welcome and strive to express bodhichitta energy, we long to assist all others in realizing freedom from suffering. Bodhichitta translates as “the enlightened essence of the heart,” or “the heart of our enlightened mind.” The great Buddhist saint Shantideva called bodhichitta “the supreme elixir, the inexhaustible treasure, the supreme medicine, the tree that shelters all beings.”

Studying Right Thought has helped me go deeper into the difficult lesson in life that deals with our thoughts and the concept that in the early stages of our journey we are seldom aware of our true thoughts. Our true thoughts are buried deep within our minds underneath the monkey-mind chatter, the habitual and the unconscious thinking. In order to reach these true, inner thoughts we must learn to still the mind through faithful meditation practices.

The Buddha said that the broader the student’s consciousness, the more profound is his experience of the teaching. Intellectual learning must be applied to one’s own life, into one’s own practice.

Knowledge, practice and a compassionate heart must all be united in a true teacher. It is taught that there are ten qualities all true teachers embody. They are: (1) Disciplined mind. (2) Calm mind. (3) Calm being. (4) Knowledge that exceeds students’. (5) Enthusiasm for teaching. (6) Vast learning. (7) Realization of emptiness, a commitment to practice compassion. (8) Eloquent and skillful teaching. (9) Deep compassion toward students. (10) Resilience and ultimate patience with students.

The student’s qualities need to be (1) An open mind. (2) An objective mind. (3) The intelligence to discern what is accurate from what is inaccurate. (4) Enthusiasm.

The essence of spiritual practice is to be a better person and to refrain from harming others.

And we must learn to always remain calm at our depths, like the ocean at its depths.

The Buddhists say all things and events lack self-existence. The teaching states that all things are impermanent and are an illusion. One of the greatest insights I have ever taken away from the Dalai Lama was when he said, “We can say something is an illusion, not because my writing tablet, desk and pen are not here, but we can certainly say and agree that they are impermanent.” Therefore, anything that is impermanent can be said to be an illusion because it is impermanent. It will not last forever.

The next logical conclusion is that the mind eventually reaches this level of awareness. The ultimate nature of reality is the emptiness of all things and events—the absence of independent reality. Nothing can cease the continuation of consciousness or mind. Emptiness is not nothingness. It means it does not have its own origination. This is the Middle Way. This can be most challenging for our Western minds to comprehend.

The mind can be likened to the ocean viewed from an airplane at 35,000 feet. It looks completely calm, yet when you near the surface, you find much turbulence if a storm is in progress. So, too, our minds appear to be calm and serene, but when we look inside, there can be much monkey-mind chatter and much turmoil and raging turbulence.

Our lifelong task is to learn to still the mind—to free the mind of angry thoughts, sad thoughts, depressed thoughts, separate thoughts, lonely thoughts, hateful thoughts, thoughts of attachment. The only means of doing this is constant practice and observation, replacing an angry thought with a calm thought, a sad thought with a joyous thought. We must practice deep meditation.

After much practice, the troubled mind can be put to rest, and then the basic nature of the mind can rise. Our basic nature is serene, clear, calm.

In order to have Right Thought, Thich Nhat Hanh says that we must embody the Four Immeasurables—Love, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity. They are the very nature of a noble being, an enlightened being. We must stop feeding our negative states of mind. How? We cease from calling violence “entertainment.” We cease speaking endlessly of ourselves as the victim. We begin to see it as our lesson, our karma. We cease from watering those seeds, and we learn our lessons and go on.

We must be willing to look head-on at our suffering and what causes us to suffer. If we try to avoid this meeting, our suffering will continue to be the engine that runs our lives, filling our experience with more and more suffering. When we focus on suffering, sure as day follows night, more suffering will present itself.

Personally, in dealing with mentally tormenting situations, ones that seem to grab us by the throat and not let go, I have found it takes tremendous energy, focus and unwavering commitment to move out of consuming negative thoughts and to shift back into the true nature of my mind.

Lama Chonam, dear friend and Buddhist teacher, once said while teaching at my church, “Sometimes our individual and collective mind has to be shocked into seeing the nature of reality.” He said this in direct response to 9/11, when those two jets roared into the Twin Towers in New York City, a third slammed deep into the earth of rural Pennsylvania and a fourth smashed into the Pentagon. As Americans, our collective mind was shocked to its core. The unimaginable and unspeakable had occurred. We saw the images either up close or on television, and initially few of us could grasp what was happening.

I recall that I was working at home and had stopped and turned on the television just as the first jet struck. My mind could not comprehend what my eyes had just seen. I instantly began praying and doing my utmost to remain centered. In those moments we still did not know that the horror was intentional. As that gruesome reality began to be revealed when the second jet hit the second tower, I knew I had to drive the thirty minutes to my church to be with my staff. As I drove through several suburbs of Cleveland, it was surreal. There were so few cars on the roads. At stoplights fellow drivers would look back as I looked over, and in stunned silence we would nod. It was like driving through a dream in slow motion.

For America this was one of the worst possible illustrations of wrong thought. At times it seemed as if the world had gone stark raving mad. Congregants of mine were vacationing in Hawaii at a serene, exclusive resort when the news of the attacks on the Twin Towers began to spread.

They were having breakfast on the lanai when guests began intently watching a television set reporting the tragedy. A Muslim woman standing next to my congregants’ table began to jump up and down with glee, clapping her hands. Apparently she could not even remotely contain her happiness at the suffering of our country, where, at that moment, she was a guest.

My congregants were so terrified not only by what was occurring but also by the hatred playing out before them that they immediately went back to their room, packed up and took the next flight to Honolulu. They did not want to be on a remote island, not knowing what was going to be happening next, and they felt very frightened of that woman and her hate-filled reaction.

Buddhist teachers would instruct that we must have compassion for ones exhibiting such upside-down thinking and behavior. I can understand that, as could my congregants, that they chose not to be at the same resort as that Muslim woman—a choice many of us might make under the circumstances.

Right Thinking is always in alignment with the spiritual ideal.