Get Clear About Thoughts
A basic training for recognizing how the thinking process operates and how best to relate to it. It is also an energetic adjustment! Do this guided contemplation and exercise at least once, or any time you need an adjustment. Now that you have learned it, you could also bring this into your practice from time to time, spontaneously and without the guided learning audio, whenever you feel like it. You are now equipped!
1. Thoughts are just pouring out of the mysterious well of your being. You can’t stop them, but you can be free of them. Before we start meditating we might not realize this or understand what this means. We might think that thinking is occasional. But the kind of active chattering commenting thought is repeating itself constantly. It’s picking up this, that, dropping this, that, it’s just a function that is going on. While it is possible for it to come completely silent like with a sudden sound shock or in certain highly concentrated meditation states which last a little longer than sudden shocks, it is not feasible to attempt to silence thought. Your freedom from thought doesn’t lie in that project. Your freedom lies in not feeling bothered by thought. That’s different! And one thing we can do (and it’s only one, there are many!) is what we are doing here.
Just starting to understand thought and deliberately create moments where we realize what’s been happening, such as through the thought labelling exercise here. We are breaking up thought into two categories. We are starting to understand what is happening in us. We are practicing not being bothered by thoughts, through not trying to make them go away. And each note is a little tap into the mysterious well of awakening being. It’s actually going to cause more moments of awakening to happen spontaneously in the future. That’s why I also call this exercise an “energetic adjustment.”
2. It’s also important to understand that you can’t be directly “mindful of thoughts” in the ordinary way mindfulness is explained. For instance, mindfulness has been explained as a particular way of paying attention to something that is there, like “paying attention to” a sensation in the body. Can you “pay attention” to a thought in this way? The answer is a ginormous NO. By the time that kind of deliberate observer energy is present, The Thought is Already Over!
We can use our intentional observer energy in meditation with thoughts, but we have to realize we cannot “be mindful of thoughts” in the way that it is understood normally.
Instead what happens is our awareness automatically registers thinking, but without the intentional observer energy. When the intentional observer energy returns, a memory of something past is consulted, which was also automatically formed by our awakening awareness.
(One seeming exception is when we deliberately try to pay attention to thoughts and also deliberately think certain thoughts. What happens here is an alternation so fast it’s almost indistinguishable. But you can distinguish it. Subject for a third type of thought training!)
Fact number two here is important because it shifts the belief away from the delusion that “you” are an intentional observer whose job it is to see the thinking and put a stop to it. Instead, you realize that there is an awakening being that is automatically aware of thought, does not require an intentional effort energy, and that is what wakes up out of thought. “You,” in the sense of an intentional observer, are not the one who does that. But maybe “You” in a greater sense IS what does do that. Maybe you are greater than the “intentional you” that comes and goes.
This is important because the more and more you “get” this, the more your energy is diverted from a wild goose chase of trying to stop or wake up in thought, and the more that energy is freed up to be deployed to the real moments when there is a sense of choice, play, freedom. It’s at that moment that you can make a mental note, or take any other meditation action. Getting clear about this moment is the real important thing.
The more these two facts sink into us through meditation practice, the more we will naturally start to feel thought doesn’t matter much in our meditation. And then it’s seeming power weakens. In this particular training, we even try to welcome thought.
So welcome thought, for this training.
And don’t worry if this “deep dive” went a little too deep. You will see more and more, and there are many ways to see.
And if it wasn’t too deep, then now how would you understand this question: what do you do when when it’s a moment in life when thought seems quite powerful? When you’re in an argument, when you get mad at someone, when life around us seems to be going fast and all is hectic, then thought just seems glued to everything that’s going on. In a sense, it is actually thought that’s what is going on. How do we meditate with that? How do we make room for the few seconds that may be necessary for meditating with thought rather than just blindly/stubbornly/or even unconsciously following any thought that arises (but particularly angry thoughts– or similar)?
Practically it should be noted that there are lots of options– do something that distracts you from all that, and meditate later. Choose meditations that focus on bodily sensations and pleasantness. Or embrace the difficult moment and do this training, or another, which in this case would be like exercising with a heavy weight instead of a light weight. Less repetitions, but still good for you. There is however no reason to have to struggle unless there is absolutely no choice. It’s better to get your body and mind to love meditation and so it’s good to take it easy with it at first.
And on a deeper level, you will, more and more, understand that “you” do not make this room or make this space or break from thought. That is not “your” job. Your job is to love when it appears. Your job is to be devoted to the waking part of it. “You” can’t do the other job. This is difficult to understand perhaps, but that is what you will come to understand. And if you already get it, you can get it more and more, deeper and deeper.
The north star has been used for thousands of years to navigate. Keep your eyes on the north star! Things will become brighter and brighter, clearer and clearer.
