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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Behind the Curtain

Hola Everybody,
Please consider supporting my writing and advocacy work by donating HERE.

Today I’m rooting for Mets in the wildcard!

Behind the Curtain

Central Park's Merry-Go-Round

Information crashes against our eyes at the speed of light, slams onto our eardrums at the speed of sound, and courses through our mind/ body as fast as an electro-chemical signal can flash from one neuron to the next. How do we deal with this sensory onslaught without getting overwhelmed? By blocking out most of it, and putting the brakes on what little is left.

The brain freezes the world into separate mind moments, each containing a barely adequate amount of information, and then processes these one by one in a linear fashion. The result is a world compiled more or less by what’s “out there,” but mostly organized around the limitations of the machine constructing it. It’s as if the brain and its senses quickly take a series of snapshots, and then weave them together into a movie -- our stream of consciousness. The Buddhists have a pretty good way of describing this system: delusion.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, nor does it mean that we are stupid, it means that the mind/ body is designed (in a way) to distill or distort reality in a fundamental way. For one thing, this helped us survive as a species. If we were to constantly attempt to take in the totality of reality, we would’ve long ago joined the ranks of extinct life forms.

First, creating this “shorthand” of reality allowed us to make decisions quickly (Do we fight, or do we run? Do we fuck it, or eat it?). Secondly, each mind moment creates an artificial center of stability out of a reality that is in constant flux and almost impossible to capture. 

Like the rapid unfolding of the individual frames of a film, these mind moments give the illusion of movement. As the films plays, we create all kinds of stories about the way things are, filling in the blanks of discarded data with assumptions, projections, and aspirations. Taking this process as real, we go seek gratification and security to a level that the system cannot support. The inevitable disappointment is centered on the concept of a “me,” who is both the one who wishes things were different than they are and the one who suffers when they are not. In other words, we are hardwired to misperceive reality by ignoring the impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness of it all.

There is another way we filter out information at any given moment. Most of what comes in touch with our neurology doesn’t even reach our consciousness but is relegated to our unconscious. This is because the precious resource of conscious awareness is used to carry on the important daily activities of living. Information, for our awareness, is on a need to know basis. Take the experience of learning a new task, such as learning to play a musical instrument. At first we have to “think” about it and consciously try to make our fingers go where they are supposed to go. Eventually, as the right connections are made between the brain and the muscles of the fingers and hand (“muscle memory”), the patterns disappear into our pre- and subconscious and, after a while, it feels as if we are playing automatically.

This is a very efficient process, and before long, most of what we do in our lives is accomplished without having to be very conscious about it. One would assume that this process would work to free our psychic energy to do some creative things, but this is not the case. More often, our awareness is spent looking for ways to find pleasurable experiences and getting more of them, or it is used to bitch and moan about unpleasant experiences and finding ways to avoid or destroy them. We use our creative energy -- our conscious mind -- to find new ways of wishing things were different from what they are, and our unconscious mind is relegated to maintaining the habits we have accumulated previously. The Buddhists have a good way of describing this state of mind: suffering.

The best definition of meditation I have encountered is “learning to stop arguing against reality.” We spend much of our lives and mental energy in conflict with reality. Our unconscious has been conditioned by all kinds of unhealthy patterns and these patterns help guide our behavior. We are not aware of most of these and, ironically, the only way we can become aware of what we don’t see is by changing something else first. We may not be able to see the unconscious conditioning, but we can become aware of the suffering it causes. By training our awareness in a methodical way, we strengthen its ability to open to more of the information available to the senses in the present moment. 

Mindfulness meditation is the art and practice of being present with whatever is happening here and now: when our attention/ awareness is strong, we are not stuck arguing with reality. With less liking and disliking, there is less stress coming from the narrowly defined sense of you that keeps you separate from the rest of the world. As the influence of your terminal uniqueness decreases, suffering deceases also.

We are always working with an imperfect model of reality. What makes the difference, however, is to understand the limitations of our constructed world. What helps us to awaken is learning to see more clearly how our perception is being used in skillful and unskillful ways, and to use that awareness in the service of creating well-being for ourselves and the well-being of those around us. The Buddhists have a word for that too: they call it wisdom.

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

Sunday Sermon [Your Personal Song]

Hola mi Gente,

So-called progressives demand that we vote for the “lesser of two evils” as if were our sacred duty, because, you know… Trump (forgetting that the scariest candidate is Rafael “Ted” Cruz). I would submit, if I could borrow a phrase I heard investigative reporter, Bob Scheer say, that we’re not voting for the lesser of two evils, but the evil of two lessers.

* * *

The Power of Attention

Sometimes we don't look at things as much as we overlook them. The most important tools to our happiness are right there in front of us waiting. But like an old friend who now suddenly appears as the person you have been looking for all along, we see the power in things we take for granted if we take the time to simply pay attention.

Being present, or paying attention, is a good example of what I'm talking about. We spend so much of our lives lost in memories of things past or pining for future fantasies, that we have no time for the present moment. The fact is that without now, we can't do anything. If we're not present, then we lose. The NY Lottery has an ad campaign with the slogan, “You gotta be in it to win it.” And so it is with life.

Most of us don't pay attention; we're too full of assumptions. We don't actually see our loved ones, we see our own projections. We don't really listen. In fact, we’re not wired to pay attention and  generally pay attention to what's negative -- great for survival, not so great for everyday life. In other words, our attention often operates in the background, allowing us to interact with the environment without much thought, and it can bias us to make certain decisions without us being aware of it. This is a good thing when we’re trying to figure out whether something is edible, fuckable, or if it will eat us. Standing around attempting to process all that information would have doomed us as a species.

However, this is not a good thing for higher order types of functions. Such as listening to each other, or not taking things for granted, or allowing the biases we were taught as children to function as prejudice. Training our attention as such practices as mindfulness meditation, provides us with awareness and the opportunity to take wise actions to further balance this negativity bias.

I had a teacher who used the following story to highlight the power of something as simple as listening. Some of the details are sketchy, but I think I've been able to preserve the core message.

In an east African tribe (I forget which) a child's life is not counted from the day it's born, nor on the day it is conceived, as in other cultures, but on the day the child is a thought in the mother's mind. As soon as the mother realizes she wants to have a child, she will go off alone somewhere, under a tree, for example, and she quiets herself and simply listens. Not listening for anything in particular, or asking for answers, or anything like that -- just listening.

Bare attention... 

She waits to hear the song of the child who wants to be born in her heart. And as she hears this song, she sings it to her herself. When she returns to her village, she teaches the song to her husband. In that way when they make love, when they connect in love, they sing this song in unison in order to invite this child to be born. Later, when the mother conceives, she sings this song to the life growing in her womb.

She teaches the song to her neighbors so that the first thing the child hears when it is born is its song in celebration of its birth. Later, as the child grows, if it falls and scrapes its knee, an adult will soothe the child's cries by singing its song. When the child grows into adulthood, the song is sung in celebration of their rite of passage. When there is a marriage the songs of both participants are sung.

Finally, when that individual grows older and passes from this existence the song is again invoked.

Imagine living in a society in which such attention and listening were truly valued and cultivated. A world where stopping and being present is like a hit song we all celebrate and dance to. What would your song sound like?

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