Hi, everyone. Chris Evans here. How you doing? I'm answering a few questions today for my dear, dear friend, Lindsay McKeen. She has a blog. She's a wildly intelligent person, one of my favorite people.
And she had a few questions for me, and I'm happy to answer them for her, so let's dive（跳水） in. What thought process gets you through the ups and downs associated（交往） with life? What thought process? For me, it's trying to stay present. I think, Lindsay, as you know, Lindsay and I met when I was 17, and we both had a very similar spiritual（ 精神的） belief system. And mine was a little more rooted in a little bit more of a noisy brain.
I had certain beliefs and desires（愿望）, and I wanted to be a certain type of person, but a lot of my thoughts were kind of, I guess, rooted in the ego（自我）. And when I say the ego, I don't necessarily mean arrogance. I just mean the part of your brain that says "I." It's the thinker（思想家）. And that part of your brain is very self（自己）-serving, and it lives in a world of comparisons and time, and none of these things are helpful. And it just kind of would consistently（一贯地） take me out of a positive place.
The man I wanted to be, or the man I thought I should be, or thinking you know how you should be doing things, or what you should be doing, but then not executing（实行） those things leaves you in this kind of spiral（螺旋） of disappointment（失望）. But again, all that thinking is based on time. You're basing who you are and what you think you should be on who you'll be tomorrow and who you were yesterday. So for me, the most effective tool I've adopted（采用） is just trying to stay present. When you're in the moment, it's not like you've satisfied（令人满意） the part of your brain that thinks in terms of time. The part of your brain that thinks in terms of time just gets quiet, kind of doesn't exist anymore.
So a lot of my old hurdles have kind of become far more manageable（易管理的） by just staying present. All you really have in life, I think, is just now, a series of nows. And I think when you can kind of surrender（使投降） to that, you can't lose. So for me, getting through the struggles（ 努力） that are associated（交往） with day-to-day life is just be present. Don't think about tomorrow. Don't think about the next minute.
Just where are you right now? Don't miss（未击中） right now. Be here now. And a nice sense of calm just kind of washes over. When did you start to think this way and where do you believe the thoughts originated（引起） from? I probably started thinking this way when I was maybe 15, 16 years old.
And they say you don't really wake up from dreams, you wake up from nightmares（梦魇）. And not to say my childhood was a nightmare at all, by any means. But I certainly started to see a pattern where whatever my struggles or challenges were at that age, if they were ever kind of met or satisfied（感到满意的）, I started to see how the next day, my brain found new struggles and challenges to be at odds（奇数） with. And you start to realize how amazingly（惊奇地） resilient（弹回的） that part of your brain is, that can just create conflict（争论） and truly（真实地） be at odds（奇数） with what is. And I started to worry that no matter what happened or where I went in my life, will that always be that way? What's preventing me from being truly happy or truly peaceful or present?
What is the thing that's creating this conflict? And you start to realize a lot of it, you know, when you take, it's not those individual things. Well, that girl didn't like me or, well, that guy's smarter than me. That's not it. It's the part of your brain that is driving this machine, the eye, that ego. It's a very self-serving animal and it lives in a world of comparison.
And a lot of Eastern philosophies（哲学）, whether it's Buddhism or Taoism, Hinduism, they all kind of share a similar awareness（意识） of that brain noise and its potential（潜在的） pitfalls. And at that age, I just kind of, that's the one thing that just made the most sense to me. That's the one thing that I saw as, it just made sense to the treadmill that I saw myself running on. That was the one thing that I said, yeah, that's exactly the, that's what's going on here. This is just this brain. That's just, it's, no matter what I do, it's going to find new things.
Scared（ 惊吓） me and that worried me and that's what kind of made me want to pursue（继续） a little bit more exploration（探险） into that way of thinking. What teachings have helped you shape（形成） your journey along the way? Well, I'm a big fan of reading, big fan of Ekratolay. That guy is, that guy is it. The Power Now is a fantastic book, New Earth's a fantastic book, Stillness（寂静） Speaks. First book I read that really turned me on to all that was Siddhartha.
Siddhartha's a phenomenal（ 显著的） book about a guy who was a brahmin, educated man, but still felt that something was missing, goes to the woods, even meets Buddha, decides he can't even follow Buddha, you know, he still just kind of feels that any type of education given（做） to him by someone else is still just going to be filtered（滤过） through that kind of egoic eye.