When I am meditating, I often find myself pulled into thinking and become enchanted by the contents. You suggested being sensitive to the way that thinking pulls us away from our current experience. Can you say more about that?
When we sit quietly with the intention of meditating, our normal activities and engagements are suspended. However, thinking often continues in spite of the fact that, in most cases, it is no longer required by our current circumstance. Why is this?
Thinking continues because our current experience is felt to be insufficient. There is a sense of lack. Most of our thinking is not functional, investigative, creative or celebratory. It arises as a means of avoiding the discomfort of the sense of boredom, dis-ease, irritation, dissatisfaction and so on. In short, it is an escape from our suffering in the present into an imaginary past or future where we believe happiness is to be found.
When we are sitting quietly, the normal means through which we escape our discomfort – objects, substances, activities and so on – are no longer possible. But thinking provides an avenue of escape. Although the current thought that takes us away from our suffering into a past or future seems innocuous enough, all our suffering is contained within it. Thinking, in this case, is the means by which we resist or escape the now.
All our suffering is contained in the thought, ‘I don’t like what is present; I want what is not present’. In fact, the ego or separate self is created, or at least imagined, with that thought. In the absence of that thought, we are one with the moment: participating in the flow of experience and responding to whatever it requires without separating ourself out, as an individual entity, from the whole.
When I say suffering, I am not referring to resistance to pain or danger – that is a natural and intelligent response of the body – I am speaking of psychological suffering. Psychological suffering always arises on behalf of a self which, when investigated, cannot be found.
So, rather than escaping the discomfort of your current experience through thinking, become aware of the uncomfortable feeling that lies beneath it. In other words, instead of following your thinking forwards towards an object, person or situation in the past or future, trace it backwards, in the opposite direction, to the feeling that underlies it. Face that feeling instead of escaping from it.
The peace you seek can never be found by escaping your current experience into an imaginary past or future. It lies behind your uncomfortable feelings and the thoughts whose purpose is to avoid them. That is to say, it lies in the depths of your self.
Turn towards the feelings. Welcome them. Allow them. As you sit with this attitude, a shift may happen in which you recognise your self as the welcoming itself. You are no longer lost in, and a victim of, the feeling. The feeling flows through you but you do not flow with it. You are the openness in which it is arising. You are the spacious presence in which the feeling arises, exists and into which it eventually vanishes. But whether it vanishes or not is of no concern to you. You, this welcoming-without-agenda are, like empty space, always at peace irrespective of the presence or absence of feelings.
In time, because the resistance at its core has subsided, the feeling of discomfort will diminish. Eventually it will disappear. However, the disappearance of the discomfort is the by-product not the goal of the welcoming. This welcoming has no goal. It is one with the moment and, thus, always and already at peace.
Thinking will continue to arise but not compulsively. When required for functional, investigative, creative or celebratory purposes, thinking will take place. The only thoughts that will diminish are those that arise on behalf of an imaginary ego or separate self. In fact, free from the tyranny of an imaginary self on whose behalf most of our thoughts arise, thinking will be liberated. It will, as a result, become clearer, more efficient, intelligent and creative.
