The Mind as Servant
La Mente como Sirviente
A student notices the mind's habit of identifying problems and trying to fix them, leading to a discussion about the relationship between mind and thinking, the difference between brain and mind, and how childhood coping mechanisms become sources of suffering.
The Mind as Servant
A student notices the mind's habit of identifying problems and trying to fix them, leading to a discussion about the relationship between mind and thinking, the difference between brain and mind, and how childhood coping mechanisms become sources of suffering.
I see my brain trying to acknowledge the problem and trying to fix it. It's this recurring theme that comes up over and over again in every discussion: trying to fix something, as if we're not okay.
The mind is good at that. It's good at looking at a situation, creating a pattern, examining the pattern, finding a problem, and working on a solution. That's what it does, and it's great at it. But the problem I'm pointing to is that we use it for problems that aren't actually helpful to try to solve. This is why I'm calling it a distraction. We project the problem onto something or somewhere, and it's actually a distraction, because the mind could look at anything as a problem.
I felt really lost during the meditation. My mind was just going all over the place. It didn't know where to settle.
The mind can't settle
The mind can't settle. All the mind does, as our teacher would say: the heart pumps blood, the mind pumps thought. By that, I believe he was pointing to its nature, its healthy nature. Normal, healthy functioning is thought, thought, thought, thought. The heart is pumping blood; the mind is thinking, thinking, thinking. What is it doing? Problem, problem, problem. Or imagining. But I would suggest that a lot of the wakeful dreaming, the imagining, is actually a form of problem-solving.
For example, right now I could imagine: if I were back in Mexico, I would feel warmer. If I felt warmer, I would feel better, and I would be okay, because right now I'm not okay since I'm a bit cold. And then I could find myself distracted: Mexico, Mexico, Mexico, it was so nice. I start having fantasies and memories and "what ifs" about the future. Maybe I could go to Mexico next month. It could feel like I'm just daydreaming. But actually it started from "I feel a little chill and I remember how nice it felt in Mexico. If only I were there, then I would be okay."
I'm trying to reframe this for you so you can see that when the mind is daydreaming, it's actually problem-solving.
Mind versus brain
It's like this little experience and our brain blows it up into this huge problem.
I wouldn't say it that way, because first of all, I would suggest you say "mind" instead of "brain." You have a direct relationship with your mind but not with your brain. You don't know what your brain is doing. You know directly the experience of your mind. So what you're describing is your experience; you're seeing what your mind is doing. Do you see the difference? The brain is the biological, physical organ. You have an understanding of the mechanism of the brain, but you really only have a direct relationship with your mind.
Right, the result.
What you're calling "the result" still starts from a theory of how the brain produces thought. But it's just a theory. I could suggest, for example, that the brain doesn't produce thought. Maybe it's a receptor.
This is a bit of a side point, but I want to suggest that when you describe your experience with thinking, you refer to it as "mind" rather than "brain," because that is what you're having a direct relationship with. This is important because it's about coming more and more into direct relationship with your experience, as opposed to beliefs. We could talk about theories of brain-mind interface. This is a very big problem. There is no scientist in the world today who knows how the brain and the mind interface. It's the biggest problem of science today, and it was the biggest problem of science in the past. So when you describe the function as if it were the brain, you're detached from your current reality. We don't know how matter and mind interface. We just don't. If you disagree, I'm very interested in this and we can have a separate conversation.
The mind as a servant
But from there, look at how the experience of your mind isn't just something that is happening to you. I would suggest you see it more as: you are in a relationship with mind, with thinking. And in a sense, it is a servant. I could say, for example, "I want to imagine being in Mexico. I want to imagine the sensation of warmth on the beach." And it's all happening as I say it.
The mind is a servant.
It's completely in my service. I could say, "I want to remember painful experiences of my childhood," and I could close my eyes and go there.
There is a relationship with the mind that is similar to the breath. The breath can function completely autonomously, or we can direct it.
Yes.
That's incredible. And it's actually why so many meditation practices have to do with the breath. The mind works the same way. We could completely let it be, and it's going to be thinking, thinking, thinking. Or we can direct it.
I'm spending quite a bit of time on these two points because I think they are very important. One: see that when you're describing your thinking, you're describing mind and not brain. Two: in the relationship with the mind, it's not always completely autonomous and outside of your control. You are responsible in that relationship. That's why the mind is often called a tool.
Choosing our suffering
When we're feeling like we are victims of our inner state and the processes of our mind, we are actually engaging with our mind, asking it for a particular kind of experience, for a reason. And we often don't want to see that reason. I would say we never want to.
When we're going through an inner experience that is a form of suffering, we often don't want it to stop. On the surface, in our conscious experience, we don't want it: "I don't like this. This is unpleasant. I'm suffering." But on a deeper level, we are choosing it. I've seen this in myself and in others. It's pretty much always this way. What happens is we engage in a habitual process where we experience suffering as a consequence, but actually it is helping us deal with something we don't want to face.
You can return to the metaphor of the child who doesn't want to take a bath. We learn from childhood these ways of distracting from reality, distracting from our freedom and our responsibility. And when we grow up with those habits, the process reinforces a kind of suffering.
How childhood coping becomes adult suffering
When we are children, we experience things that are too much, too overwhelming. So we develop an internal habit of thinking in order to cope with that, in order to make it okay. One such process is repression. We stop feeling what we really feel, and we experience an inner mental state when that feeling is present but repressed. Over time, we grow up, and what we learned to do in order to not feel what was overwhelming, what we learned to do in our thinking, we later experience as suffering.
For example, my father was very demanding of me. I'm trying to put into words something that is actually my own experience rather than a made-up example. He was very demanding, and there was pain in the relationship with him. I felt unloved, unseen. He was very harsh. In that disconnect, there was a lot of pain and a lot of fear. I felt intimidated, and there was pain because of how he related to me. So there was tremendous fear and pain in that relationship with my father.
I learned to create a kind of fantasy world where I did the right thing, where I was a good boy. I pushed myself to be how he wanted me to be. There was this identity: "I'm a good boy, and I'm going to do what I have to do." This took many forms over the years. But at one point, in my late teens, I was very contracted in this whole mechanism of doing the right thing while also pushing myself constantly, very stressed.
It was my reality. I didn't think this was something I was doing. It was my identity. And at one point, it cracked open because it became unbearable. I was in so much distress and self-hatred, though I didn't know it was self-hatred at first. It started to crumble when I began to feel so upset with myself. I was blaming myself for not being able to make it work, because I was trying so hard, doing the right thing, trying so hard.
I'm summarizing something that is really far more complex, because it took many years and many twists and turns. But I was now in immense suffering. And then I noticed the self-hatred. I was just angry with myself, angry with myself. And then I thought, "Okay, what is this?" So I started to feel what this story was creating. It was the very foundation of that identity, and all of it started to collapse. One way it collapsed was that I felt anger toward my father, which I hadn't felt before, not in that way. This was rage.