I’ve been thinking about thinking and thought. Remembering back to a Major Moment of Insight I had while meditating, when, possibly for the first time, I truly saw a thought take shape, hold its own, and pass away. It was momentous because it was so very clear. Meditation teachers had told me this happens, and there it was, happening right before my own mind’s eye! Interestingly, this put some space between me and my thoughts. I really saw that the thoughts were separate from me, that in some way thoughts happened to me. Or at me. Or around me. Or with me. But they weren’t me. Interesting.
Some time later a meditation teacher invited me to see if I could catch the very beginning of the thought, to see where it came from. I watched with an eagle eye. I watched and paid attention and watched. And yet I could never quite see it when it happened. One moment nothing there, no thought. The next moment, the very beginning of the thought. It had already appeared, and I’d missed the generation. Somehow I’d missed the crux of nothing becoming something. Crazy maddening! The same teacher invited me to watch where the thought went. Same thing happened. One moment it’d be there, with me watching and focusing like white on rice, and the next it was gone. Where did it go? No idea. Just gone. How did I miss it?!?
In some weird way, it seems like thoughts are like mushrooms.
It’s rained a lot lately. This morning I walked into the back yard and there were mushrooms everywhere! Just like that. The spores must’ve been present yet invisible. And because of rain and light and temperature and whatever else, the mushrooms pop up. In the same way, when conditions are just so, the thought arises. And then it goes. So the conditions that give rise to thought are kind of like spores—easy not to see, but there nonetheless.
Part of what happens in meditation is that people begin to see the thought process, the coming and going, the patterns, the constant movement of the mind. They get to know how their minds work, how their mind reacts and processes its conditions. In therapy people get to really look at and examine their mind’s conditions. It’s possible to understand what the conditions are, why they are present, how they are connected to other ideas, stories, and conditions. It’s even possible to root out problematic or ineffective thoughts so that they aren’t fertile any more—to get to a point where it’s possible to have thoughts, to not believe them, to not be ruled by them, and to live with them in some sort of agreeable way.
This speaks to one way I like to use meditation as a therapeutic practice: to help people figure out the roots of their thinking, to explore it and understand it, so that they can then make effective choices about which thoughts to entertain and which to disregard. We really don’t have to believe all our thoughts. They’re just the mushrooms of our minds.
Photo credit: Elizabeth Paley mightoutashould.blogspot.com