By Schoorel:
Balancing thought with silence How to halt the inner dialogue? How to stop thinking? When our train of thought is moving at full speed, it can seem almost impossible. But this is just how it seems, in actual fact it can be achieved relatively easily. It's not a big deal. Like learning how to ride a bicycle, it is not all that difficult, although you do need to go through a process of learning, of trying and practicing. You can't just mount a bicycle for the first time in your life and expect to ride it without a learning period. Conscious silence is something you will need to learn by trial and error, you will need to 'get the hang of it'. It is a knack. Excessive thinking is a habit. To kick the habit requires a certain discipline, we have to remind ourselves not to automatically revert to thinking all the time. But like riding a bicycle, to stop thinking is not incredibly difficult.
The idea is not that you never think again, the idea is simply to balance thought with silence, to put thinking in perspective, and to make it a voluntary process. The dimension of conscious silence is inestimably valuable, and you can bring it back into your life.
Discovering silence Your chances of discovering this inner silence serendipitously, are slim. You could get a taste of it when your hand unexpectedly gets caught in a lawn mower or something. You are jolted into silence, and your whole thought process gets interrupted for a few moments. Or you may have a glimpse of it when you jump out of a plane for the first time. Or when you jump out for the 31st time, but now your chute fails to open. In these extreme situations your mind might go into spontaneous silence, a silence in which you are acutely aware. Your inner dialogue can come to a halt because of radical circumstance. And in a way it's a thrill. This silence in your brain, this acute awareness, is so refreshing, replenishing.
There are other, maybe less spectacular situations in which we may experience this silence spontaneously. Imagine entering a room where, unbeknownst to you, someone you love dearly is sleeping. There is another person present who indicates, in the most friendly manner, for you to hush. You immediately understand the situation, and immediately you are quiet. Right then and there you stop talking, you don't utter a single word more, and even inside you become very quiet. For a few moments you stop thinking, and you become very attentive.
Meditation You can learn this attentive silence. This state of attentive silence is the true meaning of the word 'meditation'. Meditation has become a confusing word, these days almost everything is called meditation. Meditation even means contemplation, standing on your head, repeating words over and over, breathing exercises, you name it. Meditation is none of that, meditation is simply conscious silence, the state of silence in your brain while you are wide awake. You are fully conscious, but not thinking. In order to have this silence in your brain, you do not need to sit in complicated postures, nor is it necessary to go to a monastery in Tibet.
Meditation is not some exercise. It is not a technique to be practiced. It is not a concentrated effort. Concentration would make meditation an achievement of the mind, when in fact it is the mind going into abeyance, shutting down.
Don't try to stop your thinking, but learn not to think in the first place. To try to stop your thinking is repressing thoughts, it is not authentic silence. To try to silence your mind is a reactive approach. The proactive approach is to not think your next thoughts. The result is that you've stopped thinking, not because you stopped your thinking, but because you didn't continue it. Meditation is much more innocent and much more straightforward than is generally believed.
Understanding meditation simply as conscious silence, there's no need to create a dichotomy between daily life and spirituality. You can prepare a meal or do the dishes with silence in your brain. You can have a silent mind listening to someone, or walking down the street, taking a shower, having a drink. You can be in inner silence in so many situations: during your golf game, in a loud discotheque, while making love, in a deep, and intimate embrace. Having silence in your brain does not mean that you go blind or stupid, you are perfectly able to do all sorts of things, and actually with more awareness, with more presence. You are present-minded, not absent-minded, not lost in thoughts.
How to literally not think So how to not think? We need to consider the thought process. We need to have a better idea of how it works. The thought process is like a train, a steam-train of thought. In order for the train to move, we have to burn pieces of wood in the engine: we have to provide the brain with thoughts. One log feeds on the previous, and this is how we get the train moving. So we keep feeding these logs into the train's engine in order for the train to get moving and gather momentum. One thought feeds on the previous, the momentum builds, and our train of thought gets moving.
This is a train without brakes though, and if we want to stop it, the only way is to let it run out of steam. Of course, if we keep feeding new logs into the engine, the train will never run out of steam.
Some people - in an effort to quickly stop the train - will try to get logs out of the engine! They use new logs to try to get the ones burning out. Unfortunately, the results are always counterproductive. They never succeed in getting logs out of the engine. Instead, the logs they were trying to get them out with catch fire! In a more frantic effort to stop the train they use new logs to get the ones that just caught fire back out, but the same thing happens, and the train keeps moving at full speed. In fact, the more frantic the effort to stop the train by trying to get logs out of the engine, the more wood is burned, and the more momentum the train gathers.
In order to stop the train you don't want to meddle with logs already in the engine. Let them burn out, they burn themselves out in little time. Once you think a thought, let it burn itself out, because trying to undo this thought is a futile effort. In trying to undo it, you only think more thoughts. The single discipline needed to stop the train, is to not put new logs into the engine. You have been feeding logs into the engine so regularly, so automatically, that you may find yourself feeding logs into it again, just out of habit.
Remember, stop feeding new logs, and don't meddle with logs already in the fire. Don't bring in new thoughts, and don't meddle with thoughts that you are already thinking. If thoughts continue for a while, it is just the momentum of a train of thought moving at full speed that needs to come to a halt. You just take care not to fuel the train while you are waiting for it to run out of momentum and stop. You just take care not to put yet another log into the fire, and soon your train of thought will run out of steam. To meditate simply means to not think, to not continue throwing thoughts into the engine of your steamtrain of thought. Don't bother about thoughts that you are already thinking, just be alert to not think your next thought. This is the whole secret of meditation.
[Excerpt prior to the above:]
I am conscious, therefor I am You are not conscious because you think. You can think, and learn to think, because you are conscious in the very first place. This is why Descartes' idea 'I think, therefor I am', is incorrect. The actual situation is 'I am conscious, therefor I am'. You are conscious, therefor you are.
Silent awareness When we are born, we do not yet know how to think. A baby is born with silent awareness in its brain. A baby is conscious long before he or she learns to think. The first few months of our existence we do not think to ourselves, there is no inner dialogue. Thinking comes later. And while it is human to think, it is in the nature of consciousness to be silent. But we haven't known ourselves as consciousness. The paradigm of the human being has turned us into compulsive thinkers. We don't know how to stop anymore. Our thought process is out of control. We don't remember the joy and simplicity of silence in our brain: alive silence, conscious silence.
Confusion is not our natural state The human being is a thinking animal. Thanks to our thinking, our use of concepts, we can do incredible things. Thinking is our number one strength. Thinking is humanity's main tool, and it's powerful. It is what a hammer is to a carpenter: he can do many wonderful things with it, and he uses it all the time. The hammer is extremely valuable and functional; it is essential to him. Yet it would be very strange if he would never to let go of his hammer again, if he would take it to bed and into the shower, not even letting go of it while making love... However, with our tool called thinking we do just that, we think all the time. Thinking has become a cult, it is out of proportion. Thinking has become an addiction.
Confusion is not our natural state. A baby is not confused. We are born with an untroubled mind, no conflicting ideas and beliefs in our minds, no ideas at all. We are naturally clear, not naturally confused. Confusion is manmade. Confusion is a state that we hype ourselves into, we are not born confused, we don't wake up confused. Confusion means that we are stuck in a world of concepts. Simply looking into life there is no confusion, but tangled up in concepts we become confused. Incessant thinking has confused us. We are restless, not at peace, always fidgeting. Thoughts are constantly running through our minds.
Paradigm Shifting: From Thought to Conscious Silence This paradigm-shift is a shift beyond paradigms, from thought to conscious silence. Moving beyond thought and paradigms. Leaving conceptual understanding behind and shifting into immediate understanding, without mediation of thoughts and concepts. Understanding through direct intelligence, direct perception.
A mist of thoughts Thinking has become a habit to the point of addiction. We cannot stop it. We have turned into obsessive thinkers, incessantly thinking and worrying. But why think all the time like a chainsmoker who lights one cigarette after the other with no gaps in between? Thinking can be voluntary, it does not need to be compulsive. You can be a master of your mind, it need not be the other way around. We are slaves of our minds as long as thinking is compulsive. Compulsive thinking is not freedom, we are held prisoner. We are stuck within the confines of our minds. Thinking has become uninterrupted, like a chain, or a train of thought. We don't know how to stop our inner dialogue.
We can't look at a sunset without confirming the accepted paradigm of a sunset: "What a beautiful sunset." Maybe it is not beautiful! It will be hard for us to tell, because we are not seeing the sunset without coloring it with our thoughts. We experience projections of our minds, not reality. We are so engrossed in thinking that direct experience has become an exception. Whatever we do, walking down the street, taking a bath, watching a sunset, we are not simply there. While we are having an experience, whatever it happens to be, we are either commenting on the experience or thinking about something else. We are not directly experiencing life, we are looking at life through a mist of thoughts. We are lost in thought almost all the time. As parents, we do not understand our baby's world, we have completely forgotten what it is like to live with a silent mind, to live with silence in our brain.
Sanity Continuum What is sanity? Sanity and madness are the extremes of a sanity continuum. The one extreme is madness, insanity, and the other is sanity. What we consider normal is not exactly sanity, it lies somewhere in the middle of these extremes. As individuals and as humanity we haven't blossomed into complete sanity yet, we still have to go sane. Sanity is a healthy state of mind, and madness is a mental illness. The more thinking is of a voluntary nature, the more sane we are. When thinking becomes a compulsive and autonomous process, we become insane. The more autonomously thoughts run through the mind, the more insane we are.
Sanity is being able to determine whether you actually think or do not think at all, and exist with a silent mind. When you do think, you determine what you think of, you are able to choose the direction of your thoughts. Thinking is a voluntary process. And because it is voluntary, it is beautiful, useful, and not a burden at all. You think when you feel like it, thinking is not compulsive, it has not taken over your life. When you are sane, thinking is a tool that you use appropriately. You are not imprisoned by it. You are free from the mind.
Somewhere in the middle between sanity and insanity lies what we call normalcy, we can more or less determine the direction of our thoughts, but we cannot choose whether to actually think or not. Thinking has a certain autonomy, the process of thinking itself seems to be happening of its own accord. Thinking is compulsive in the sense that we seem not to be able to stop it anymore, though in general we are still able to determine what we think of. Thinking is still very useful, but it can also be a burden. It can be almost synonymous with worrying. And continuously thinking is tiring too. Thinking does not allow us to rest, to fall asleep naturally. To think our whole life long, every single minute of the day, is ludicrous and close to madness. Excessive thinking makes us borderline psychotics.
Insanity is taking it one step further, our thought process becomes so autonomous that it truly overtakes our life. That is madness, when thinking has become completely autonomous. Not only have we no control over whether we actually think or not, even what we think of is no longer our choice. Thoughts are happening as if by themselves, and we are unable to give direction to our thoughts. Thinking is a burden, and we think nightmarish thoughts. We are a prisoner of our mind, our whole thought process is out of control, and we have not a clue how to stop it. All voluntariness has disappeared out of thinking. It seems as if our thought process is living a life of its own.
What is the difference between talking to ourselves and thinking to ourselves? The first is considered a sign of a disturbed mind while the second is considered normal, but there's not all that much difference. In order to go sane, you will need to learn to be in charge of your mind, to be in charge of your thinking. When the inner dialogue stops, that's the end of all schizophrenia. Finally you experience your wholeness, your undivided being. In conscious silence, a human being becomes sane.
-------------------- Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.
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