Thoughts Without a Thinker

Hola mi gente,
So, I’m getting my groove back, using my creativity. Things are looking up. Next step: get my own place!

Entering the Stream

Stream of Consciousness, Chenille stems, styrofoam, Julia Buntaine.

Thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find -- nothing.
 -- Aesop (620–560 BC) The Goose with the Golden Eggs

I once met a lovely woman, highly intelligent, beautiful writer. In her early 40s, she was at her creative and physical peak. I used to joke that she looked as if she lived on a Stairmaster. In short, here was a woman I felt I could enjoy knowing better, maybe even --who knows -- explore the “C” word with her. She had one major drawback, however... 

She thought too much.

She was ruled by her thoughts and she wasn’t satisfied with torturing herself with her thinking, she insisted I join in also. I’ll give you an example, we would plan a meet-up (she lived in Boston and I live in NYC) and initially we would talk excitedly about what we would do together, but as the date would draw nearer, thoughts stemming from her insecurities would predominate our conversations. At first I was more than happy to help her dispel some of these thoughts. I mean, she would have one thought (“Eddie doesn’t like me, so he won’t come”) and then another thought connected to that thought would appear (“Eddie is just coming because he wants sex”), which would be connected to another thought (“I’m such a loser”). This would go on until her whole thought process and beliefs around our meet-up would be so totally screwed up, so totally disassociated from reality, that I would have a hard time addressing all of it. 

Eventually, I would have to tell her that I didn’t need to hear all her thought processes and she was so offended that she broke off meeting with me. She was so hurt because, according to her, her thoughts were her and I shouldn’t have been so insensitive to her thoughts (or something along those lines). I don’t “do” therapy in my personal life, though friends constantly ask me questions that essentially are invites to “analyze” them. I don’t even adhere to that type of theoretical orientation. LOL

You might judge my friend’s thinking, but I see people do that kind of thing all the time. I mean, we all do it to a degree. We like to call it “analyzing,” but it resembles mental masturbation. We create scenarios out of a tangled web of thought constellations and ingrained belief systems we take as ultimate truth. I will add that my friend’s thinking brought her a lot of suffering in the form of clinical depression.

We live in a society in which we’re encouraged to live from the “neck up” at the expense of our bodies and the rest of reality -- we live disembodied lives. I see it all the time in my work. Ask someone how he or she feels and they will quickly proceed to tell you how they’re thinking about their feeling.

I often tell my women friends that they shouldn’t think around me because it makes my dick hard. I’m kidding! It doesn’t work, telling someone not to think, makes them think even more intensely.

Let me be clear: thinking is not bad in itself. In fact, thinking is an essential tool for our well-being and survival. Indeed, our distinguishing feature as a species is the ability to create complex symbols, agree on their meaning, and use them to encode our knowledge. The ability to think allows us to compute, reason, and create, and, most importantly, to share our understanding with each other in the form of speech or writing. We can even record our thinking (on blogs, no less) for others!

The issue here is that as a species we have grown to value thinking to the exclusion of other aspects of our being. We have become more identified with our thoughts and the more we become lost in our personal soap operas, the more disconnected we have become from what we have in common with other human beings and our ecology. We have surrendered our sense of self to our thinking mind, becoming “lost in thought.”

I should know, because I too was addicted to the non-stop ruminations of my thought-stream. After years of meditation practice, the most significant change in my life has been my relationship to my mind. We’re still together, my monkey and I, but we’re no longer in a codependent relationship. Slowly, but surely I am gaining my liberation from the tyranny of thinking.

The change was precipitated by the acknowledgment that my mind had a thinking problem. I was a heavy thinker, often engaging in about 70,000 to 150,000 thoughts a day! I got up in the morning and -- bam! -- I was thinking 2-3 thoughts per minute, continuing through the day until night when I thought myself to sleep.

I tried everything from analysis (which made me more attached to my thinking) to screaming and flailing about, which only temporarily diminished the flow of thinking. Eventually, I would turn to drugs in an attempt to “blow my mind” by short-circuiting the neural wiring and I have to say -- one time I even forgot who I was (literally).

Later, I would practice a form of meditation in which the goal was not to stop thinking, but rather expose the mind to itself. Before my meditation practice I was completely absorbed on the content of thoughts, how to manipulate them and extract meaning from them. That is what we’re taught and graded on in school and it is what our culture values.

But no one had taught me how to look at my thoughts. Ordinarily, we go through life with what psychologists call a pre-conscious stream of thoughts coursing through our minds. Barely noticeable, this thought stream exerts an enormous amount of influence in our lives. We do this mindlessly without awareness. In fact, modern science shows that our thoughts aren’t the dominant player in our lives. Brain research finds that most of our interpretations of the world as well as our decision-making process takes place on what evolutionary psychologists call the “sub-personal” level, without a rational thinking self directing the process.

When I first sat down to meditate, I was almost overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the thought stream. Eventually, I learned the simple task of watching the stream without making judgments, or running around to analyze them. A resentment thought pops up, I acknowledge it gently and then let it go. Sure enough, some time will pass and another thought will present itself and I do the same thing -- I see it, acknowledge it and let it go. Eventually, this has a stabilizing effect -- you’re not stuck on the thoughts that seem to come from nowhere. You are not stuck on the content of your thoughts but engaged in the process of the thought-stream.

Eventually, with lots of practice, I was able to observe the “gap” between the thoughts. This is pure consciousness, pure awareness -- the most powerful healing force I’ve ever encountered... but that’s for another blog for another time.

It may not sound like a lot, but it’s a huge thing for me to say that the main difference between my experiences today and those of 20-odd years ago is that I catch myself quicker these days. Essentially, today I’m less prone to be carried away by every thought that comes along -- I don’t get caught up in my delusional personal soap opera as often as I used to. This is especially true in the area of resentments and personal relationships. The thought-stream is not ruling my responses or filtering my reality as much as it once did.

Today a thought can arise and I can say, “thanks for sharing, but I’m not engaging that today, I’m too busy doing something more important.”

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

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The Monkey Mind

Hola Everybody,

It’s been a great summer at least weather-wise. Don’t get caught up in the future. Enjoy the summer now while you still can. Sometimes it is our tendency to fantasize about the future or reminiscing on the past that makes us miss the present moment.

Monkey Mind

Just as a monkey swinging through the trees grabs one branch and lets it go only to seize another, so too, that which is called thought, mind or consciousness arises and disappears continually both day and night.
 -- The Buddha

Have you ever caught yourself comparing yourself to others? If I am honest, I have to admit that I have. At least I can sense the impulse -- the tendency -- to compare myself to others. This is a form of conceit. I define conceit as that activity of the mind that compares itself with others because all forms of this of thinking -- whether it is I’m better than or I’m less than or I’m just the same as -- is rooted in a feeling of self, or the “I am.” This conceit is probably one of the most deep-rooted forms of conditioning we possess. In Buddhism this type of internal activity is called the monkey mind.

Many people mistake insight for change, but this is a faulty notion. For example, we may understand that conceit may be rooted in a concept of a self that does not exist, but the habit to compare persists. The one thing that many discover early on their path is that what we normally call reality is actually only one aspect of a larger reality. There is a deeper experience outside of our individual experiences in the ebb and flow of our rushed lives. If you practice Buddhist meditation, for example, you quickly realize that the stream of thoughts we take to be ourselves is momentary -- fleeting and constantly changing. If we make the effort to experience this thought stream without identifying with it we realize very quickly that we definitely are not our thoughts.

The best antidote to conceit I have come across is to bring to it a clear awareness and focus on the fact that this stream of consciousness is constantly changing. I’ll give you an example of the monkey mind gone amok. While an undergraduate, I participated in an experiential exercise as part of a course. Part of the instruction was to in complete silence observe our thought-streams -- the internal dialogue -- without giving in to the habit of commenting or passing judgment. In effect, this was a form of meditation.

After a while, I noticed some people were jotting down notes in their notebooks. I quickly surmised that these people were doing this wrong. The instructions were clear: no communication, complete silence! After a while, I began to doubt myself and began thinking that maybe it was I who was getting it wrong: perhaps I was missing something essential that the note takers had grasped! Back and forth I went in this way until the exercise was over and I discovered that the note taking was neither right nor wrong. Some people were merely jotting down notes so that they would be able to relate the experience more accurately. Yet, I spent the whole time going ruminating over whether I had gotten it “right” in comparison to the others. LMAO!

I think what’s most useful is to begin to recognize that the comparing mind, the conceit of “I’m better than” or “I’m less than,” can be the source of a lot of insanity. It has the power to make us feel separated and apart from others and reinforces the myth of a separate self. I keep things simple and I follow the formula that love is an opening up, while fear is a contraction. The myth of a separate self is a psychological and physical contraction.

When we bring a clear awareness (not analysis!) to the monkey mind, we can begin to learn to be with it in a friendly way, without being caught up and identifying with it. When we experience the stream in this way, it simply becomes another empty thought, which we don’t have to condemn nor believe as they pass through the landscape of our mind like so many clouds. The mind stays free. Or as we used to say a long time ago: free your mind, your ass will follow.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…