Thoughts on Thinking [View all]

When most of us first learn to meditate, we begin from the premise that we are trying to still our minds. We undertake to stop the flow of thoughts that bombard us ceaselessly, distracting us and making us uncomfortable in a hundred different ways. While the desire to be free from the suffering that accompanies our thinking is understandable, the idea that we can become free of suffering by becoming free of thought - even for a moment - is probably a self-defeating mistake.

Our minds apparently secrete on the order of 50,000 thoughts every day. That's what a human mind does, after all - it thinks. Trying to stop that process would be as futile as trying to stop the pancreas from secreting insulin, and every bit as useful.

The “problem” with thoughts – if there is one – is not with the thoughts themselves. It comes from our reactions to them. It’s as though each thought pulls in its wake a little bundle of emotion, attachment and belief. Those barely-noticed burdens are what actually cause our suffering. However, because they are each carried by a thought, we notice the thoughts and blame them for our discomfort. It is not so. In fact, that misplaced blame is itself a thought, and our reaction to it is a result of our beliefs about thinking.

It is possible to approach the "problem of thinking" from another, perhaps more productive, direction. My meditation practice these days is to simply observe thoughts as they arise, linger and depart, without doing anything in particular about them. A visual metaphor that I learned some years ago has proven to be very helpful in doing this.

In meditation I see myself standing on a street corner, and imagine my thoughts to be cars on the the street. Each one appears, drives up and stops at the corner in front of me. As it sits in front of me I have a choice – I can stand still and watch until it drives away, or I can hop in and let the thought take me for a ride. If I stand there and simply watch as the thought-car drives away, I notice that another one appears immediately, giving me another opportunity to practice “just watching” rather than engaging with them.

Sometimes, though, I succumb to temptation. I become curious about what the thought looks like from the inside, and where it might be going. So I get in, either deliberately or mindlessly, and it takes me away. This is how the unpracticed mind behaves – it’s always hopping in for the ride, since this is how we have been trained to react to thoughts. Fortunately, I have found that after a bit of practice I can now quickly recognize what I’ve done. I can open the door and alight without too much drama, and go back to just calmly watching the thoughts drive by. I also practice not being annoyed with myself for having gone for the ride. I recognize that the annoyance is itself the product of another thought. And so it becomes just another car on the street.

Not being attached to thoughts – or even to the process of thinking itself – gives my mind the freedom to secrete its amazing thought-hormones without giving their potentially toxic emotional baggage a place to land.