On average we have 50,000 thoughts a day. By default, we consider our thoughts to be facts. Are they even yours? With meditation we develop the habit of observing our thoughts.
Fable: Suspicion*
There was once a man who had lost his axe. He suspected his neighbor's son of having stolen the axe.
He watched the walk, the look, the words and actions and every movement of the son. That's what a thief looks like, he thought to himself.
To his surprise, he found his axe again while working in the field.
Again he observed his neighbor's son and found that he did not look like a thief at all.
It was not the neighbor's son who changed, but his own thought.
This fable shows that subjective thoughts are sometimes obstacles to the perception of the truth. When people judge things with wrong thoughts, they will inevitably distort the truth. It also clearly shows that emotional changes often play an important role in rational judgment.
Whether they are good or bad, helpful or unhelpful, attention feeds these thoughts. When we believe in a thought, identify with it, or develop an emotional reaction towards it, we make it stronger . But when we just observe it without involvement, it soon loses its energy and dissolves back into nothingness.
In meditation, we learn to redirect our attention away from unhelpful and untrue thoughts - and focus on feeding the good thoughts with our attention to make them stronger and give them more power in our lives.
*This fable is out of The Lüshi Chunqiu, also known in English as Master Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals. It is an encyclopedic Chinese classic text compiled around 239 BC under the patronage of the Qin Dynasty Chancellor Lü Buwei.