The Battle with Thought
La batalla con el pensamiento
A question about how to relate to thinking: whether to believe every thought or dismiss them all, and how to find discernment between the two.
The Battle with Thought
A question about how to relate to thinking: whether to believe every thought or dismiss them all, and how to find discernment between the two.
Something came up for me in the meditation around evaluating the utility of questions or thoughts. I think my answer is that meditation helps with that process: from a clearer mind, it's easier to discern which thoughts are perhaps useful and which aren't. But I find myself either in the camp of believing everything that comes into my mind and spinning or worrying about it, or in the camp of "this isn't real, this isn't real, this isn't real," indiscriminately throwing it all out.
Like a black and white relationship. It's all true or it's all unreal.
And if I'm in that "it's all unreal" camp, I sometimes wonder: is this good for me? Is this useful? I need thoughts to live and plan. So I was wondering if you could say something about striking that balance.
The first step: seeing that thoughts are thoughts
It's a really good question, and more needs to be said to deepen or go beyond the first step of knowing that thoughts are just thoughts. Because thoughts are just thoughts, but are they useful? That's your question, and the answer is yes. But without seeing that they're thoughts, they become reality. We're no longer thinking; we're just living a reality that's automated, conditioned. It's the dream.
What you're describing is the consequence of having at least the understanding that a thought is a thought. And that's more than most people. The reality is that most people will be able to identify a small portion of what they experience as thought. Maybe the inner dialogue, occasionally. They'll say, "Yeah, that's me talking to myself, that's a thought." But there's so much more that we experience that is only thought.
In a sense, the work here is to see how much all of it is thought, all of what is thought.
What remains without thought
If you could push a button and no longer be able to think, or if we could take a moment and put thought aside fully: there's no time, there's no space, there's no sense of me or other, there's no sense of things, there's no sense of having been born or dying, there's no sense of there being a world, a universe with stars, with planets, with other people, except for the people you are seeing in front of you, if any. All you would know is what is experienced right now, and you wouldn't know what it is. You would just experience shapes, forms, sounds, sensations. That's it. Everything else is thought.
This is very, very clear when seen. And it can be seen to a point where it's no longer confusing, no longer something that can hypnotize you again.
The movie theater
It's like watching a movie. It's a really good movie, you're in the theater, it's loud, intense, awesome, and you're totally into it. You've done what's called a suspension of disbelief. You would never for a moment not know, in some place, that it's a movie. But it's those moments where you forget enough that you experience the best entertainment. You forget that you're in a theater, yet you never completely lose the knowing that it's a movie. That's part of the thrill. You get scared, but it's a safe kind of scared.
That's what I'm talking about, as a metaphor. You've seen through it enough that it can no longer fully convince you of its reality, no longer becomes absolutely real. Everything we experience as thought is the movie, the mind's mapping of reality.
From seeing to wise use
The more you see this, the more you're free to play with the thought aspect in the way that's most wise. I use the word "wise" instead of "practical" because it's not always about being practical. Sometimes it's about being fun, sometimes it's about other aspects beyond mere practicality. Thought can be playful, entertaining, practical, in service to many things. But if we don't first see that thought is thought, then we aren't relating to thoughts; we're relating to something we take to be real. It's not the thought of a person, it's the person itself that I believe I'm experiencing, when I'm actually just thinking about the person.
You can even be having a dialogue with a person in real time, yet you're actually mostly relating to the thought of the person and not the person themselves.
The reactive flip between extremes
The flipping back and forth you're describing happens because there's been this first step: you now know these are thoughts. Sometimes you're completely pulled in, and sometimes you're pulling really hard not to be pulled in. When we're saying "it's just thought, it's just thought, it's not real, it's not real," that's another form of resistance or denial.
The next step would be discernment around how to best use thought, how to best relate to thought. Like riding a bicycle: at first you have to consciously focus on all the little things. You have to think about it. "I'm falling to this side, the balance means I need to move my hands this way." Same with driving a car. But after a while you're not thinking about it. It's similar with everything in life: work, conversations, all of it. Through discernment and the correct use of thought, the correct use of mind, we can learn to live and function in a way where, over time, the actual experience of thought decreases.
Flow
That's what is known as entering states of flow. People enter states of flow in many ways. It could be doing a lot of work that requires the mind, but there's a lot of flow in that there isn't a deliberate thought process. If you look at scientific breakthroughs and inventions in physics, a lot of the experiences were: "I was just walking, looking at the sky or looking at the birds, and then, boom, the solution came." That's the state of flow.
But at first, we need to go through what you're going through. We need to first realize we're totally immersed in thinking, then start to see more and more the reality that the thought is just a thought. And then we get into a battle with thought, learning to meditate, learning to disidentify. So really it's just a question of practice and skill.
Neither belief nor denial
It's neither one nor the other. It's definitely not to be immersed in thought where it's taken as real. The first step is to see that it's thought. And when I say "real," it is real, but it's a thought. The problem is confusing the thing for something else. And then it's not about trying to ignore or push away thought. It's about seeing: what of it do I need right now, for what I want and what I'm doing, what I'm creating, what I'm living? You'll see that ninety percent of the thought that's happening is totally unnecessary, irrelevant, problematic. And then some of it will be useful for this moment.
Why we cling to thinking
One more thing worth noting. You can start to see why you are so addicted and immersed in thought, why there's a desperation to jump into believing thought. You'll see it because you'll notice how it helps you not feel. It helps you control the emotional and sensation space. Actually, it doesn't control it. It just distracts. And then you're going to start to notice: "Oh, I'm actually anxious. Oh, there's some fear. There's sadness. There's anxiety. There's a restlessness." Being immersed in thought numbs. It helps you disengage from all that.
The only way we're really going to free ourselves from the addiction to thinking is to engage with the sensations, feelings, and emotions that we are avoiding.