Throughout the day, practice meditation and mindfulness; learn to recognize the distance between the actual you—awareness—and the egoic mind as its ideas speed past. Examine your ideas for what they are: thoughts. Then let them go, neither accepting nor rejecting them. Being aware of your thinking process is the first step toward becoming less controlled by it. Once you understand how thought works itself out in your head, you can start to judge it more accurately and come to know it better. You can then make decisions about what to think about and what not to think about. This is the beginning of wisdom.