Letting Thought Take You
Dejando que el pensamiento te lleve
A reflection on the value of consciously allowing thought to unfold rather than pushing it away, and learning to see how thought operates from within the experience itself.
Letting Thought Take You
A reflection on the value of consciously allowing thought to unfold rather than pushing it away, and learning to see how thought operates from within the experience itself.
If we are always pushing away from thought and into sensation, we lose the ability to look at the structure and content of thought, to see how thought is actually operating.
The invitation to stay with thought
In the meditation, I gave a small suggestion along these lines: if thought is taking you, let it, and savor it. That is a very subtle pointing, but what it is really saying is this: recognize that you are going into thought, and don't try to stop it. Instead of pushing thought away and redirecting into sensation, which is a common practice, let it happen. Consciously, with awareness, with wakefulness, let thought take you. But keep some sense of knowing that you are aware you are going into thought.
From that place, the experience is very different from fully collapsing into thought, being immersed and lost in it. If you notice thought is taking you, let it take you, and start to see what it is doing. Start to see why it is appealing. Start to see why it is so addictive. The more you see how thought is operating, the more you can decide not to do that. You will have the ability to simply decide not to follow thought once you see fully how it is functioning.
We are the ones who jump
Because ultimately, thought does not take us. We do that. There is a jumping into thought, a letting thought carry us along. But there are two very different ways this can happen. One is letting thought take you in a kind of sleep while you are awake: daydreaming, identification, being carried away without knowing it. The other is letting thought take you in an awake sense, where you are noticing that it is thought, and you are seeing and allowing all of its tricks and magic to happen. Ultimately, it is a trick we play on ourselves, and we are doing it for a good reason, so to speak.