Dhamma Talk: Thinking And The Choice To Engage Or Disengage

So welcome everyone.

Tonight's talk is titled Thinking and the choice to engage or disengage.

And I just want to ask you a question first of all.

Does anybody here think in their meditation periods?

Really?

Think?

Does anybody think?

Yeah okay.

Is it helpful or unhelpful?

Well of course they're helpful sometimes.

In fact I think right intention,

The second factor on the Eiffel path,

Sometimes it's called right thought.

So it involves the development of an intention of goodwill,

Letting go or harmlessness.

One of those three types of intentions.

If you intend to do something it makes it more possible that something will happen.

There's another aspect to it too.

Vittika.

Vittika means thinking and interestingly vittika is the first Jhana factor,

Which is really quite strange.

The first factor of cultivating very strongly concentrated states.

It's called vittika.

It usually refers to initial application.

But you can think of it like a thought,

Like an intention,

Like a very strong intention of putting your attention somewhere.

Intention to put attention somewhere.

So anyway as you may know the first stanza of the Dhammapada goes something like this.

All mental phenomena,

All the world,

The mind is the creator of the world.

With our mind we create the world.

That's what it says in the first stanza of the Dhammapada.

If one speaks or acts with an unwholesome mind,

Dukkha follows,

Just as the wheel follows the hoofprint of an ox that draws the cart.

I'm just quoting here now.

All mental phenomena have their mind as the forerunner.

They have their mind as the chief.

They are mind-made.

If one speaks or acts with a wholesome mind,

Well-being follows,

Just as the wheel follows the hoofprint of the ox that draws the cart.

In other words we create the world with our mind.

And there's an interesting saying in psychology,

Actually William James is one of the forefathers of psychology.

Back in about 19 oh something,

1902 or 1910,

He made this statement something like this.

What we attend to becomes our reality.

So it's not necessarily thinking but it's talking about attention here.

So I want to,

Later on I'll talk to you about how what we do with our attention is really crucial in whether thoughts become our friends or thoughts become destructive for us.

So you've probably all heard of Pappancha.

Pappancha is a great onomatopoeic word.

It means mental proliferation and it refers to the tendency for the mind to go wild with its imagination.

And I've got it,

I've got something that Mahakachana said.

He said depending on eyes and form,

Eye consciousness arises.

The meaning of the three is contact.

Contact conditions feeling,

Which is we know in the dependent arising that's the way it goes.

What we feel we perceive.

What we perceive we think about.

What we think about we proliferate.

Because we have proliferated we are oppressed by concepts of perception,

Coloured by proliferation regarding the past,

Future and present.

In other words what happens with mental proliferation,

Which is something that happens with thinking,

We start somewhere and it just goes on and on and on.

We might start with a perception of something and we mentally proliferate to the extent that what we're creating is a reality that's not in any way related,

Which may be related to the actual reality of what we're perceiving,

But it's its own kind of encapsulated in its own thought form.

It's like the reality that we create is completely at odds with actual reality.

I don't know if anybody's experienced that,

The tendency to get caught in your head.

Do you know if anybody ever experienced worry?

Yeah?

And what about rumination?

Rumination is a little bit different than worry.

Worry is the tendency to think excessively about the possibility of some untoward event in the future.

Generally that's one way of talking about it.

It's a puncture.

It has a tendency to feed on itself and once we get going it kind of becomes addictive.

With worry we'll often think of solutions for a problem,

And so we get a sort of minor relief,

But the solutions are short-lived,

So we sort of get addicted to that minor relief,

So we start thinking again for a solution.

It's this tendency to obsessively think not obsessively,

Feed into thinking about solutions for problems.

So we get caught up in this narrow-minded limited perception of reality that's caught up in worry.

And rumination is similar.

As a psychologist I can say that worry is a feature of something called generalized anxiety disorder,

Where one is anxious.

Rumination is a little bit different.

Rumination is a feature of depression actually,

But with rumination what we tend to do is we get stuck on untoward events in the past or current difficult situations or untoward events.

We don't think of any solutions,

We just kind of mull over it,

Go over and over and over and over again.

And it becomes this proliferative process that binds us.

Our perceptions narrow,

We can't see outside that reality that we create,

And we feel miserable.

It actually,

Rumination is one of the tendencies that maintain depression.

Interesting.

So,

Now I'm sure you all know that thinking in and of itself is not a real problem.

Minds tend to think,

That's what we do with our minds,

We think.

And in and of themselves are not a problem,

It's the way we relate to thoughts that make it a problem.

And there's something called reification.

And some of you may know what reification is.

Reification is the activity of making something out of nothing.

It's the tendency to identify with thinking.

It's a tendency to identify as self that which is not self.

So thinking is the process of reification.

And I'm just quoting Alan Mollussey,

I think it was from one of his books,

The Attention Revolution,

I think.

After we have reified,

We might say something like,

This affliction is mine.

We construct a personal identity based on the reification of what never existed.

I'm an angry person,

I'm a nice person,

I'm a selfie person,

I'm paranoid,

I'm a jerk,

I'm wonderful.

It's like we start to believe all these thoughts as true,

When in fact they're just thoughts.

And I mentioned earlier that I'm a psychologist and I often work with people's thinking issues.

And there's something in ACT,

Acceptance and commitment therapy,

They talk about something called cognitive fusion.

And cognitive fusion is this tendency to have a thought or an experience,

It can be an emotion even,

And the tendency to fuse with it and believe it.

To take our thoughts to be facts,

To be true.

And fuse our identity with them.

So thoughts can become really problematic.

So we'll have a thought,

With depression we'll have a thought,

Oh I'm a failure,

I'm no good,

I'm a wash up,

I never did anything good in my life,

I didn't succeed,

Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

And we believe it.

And we develop even a core belief about ourselves as useless,

Worthless,

Hopeless,

Helpless.

And with anxiety,

It's not so much that process,

But there's still cognitive fusion.

But cognitive fusion can refer to taking thoughts literally.

In other words we'll have a thought,

We'll take,

We'll believe it to be true.

We might have this thought that,

Hmm,

Maybe all you guys looking at me and plotting to kill me later on after this talk.

I can have that thought,

And of course I don't necessarily believe it,

But if I was really paranoid,

Or if I was anxious thinking that,

Oh,

You guys aren't smiling at me now,

Maybe you think I'm a bit of an idiot.

That would be the sort of thought that I might have and feed into if I had something like social phobia.

So this fusion here means that we take our thoughts literally.

So there's lots of ways of working with thoughts,

And I mentioned earlier that William James talked about what we attend to becomes our reality.

And I,

When I do,

Working with people and their thinking issues,

I use a whole range of approaches,

You know,

Empirically validated approaches.

But I can kind of summarize these approaches into two basic strategies.

One strategy is related to serenity meditation,

And another strategy is related to inside meditation.

So with serenity meditation,

What we do is we choose to attend to one thing and not another.

Make sense?

Like we might choose an object such as the breath,

And we choose to attend to that object,

And when we're having thoughts about other things,

We just say,

Oh,

Not right now,

This is what I'm attending to.

So we're focusing our attention on one thing.

What can happen is that if we are having worrying thoughts and we feed into them,

That can become our reality.

If we focus on the worrying thoughts,

As an example,

That can become the reality of our world.

So if we can make the decision to say,

I'll be aware of worrying thoughts,

But I just won't feed into them.

I'll choose not to buy into them.

I'll choose to put my attention in this thought about what I'm doing,

For example.

It might be driving.

I'll put my attention on to focusing on what I'm doing,

Or thinking about a beautiful memory,

Or something else,

Something other than not feeding into that worrying thought.

There's something in neuroscience that goes,

There's a saying in neuroscience that goes,

Neurons that wire together fire together.

There's another saying that goes,

Use it or lose it.

So if there's a tendency to feed into worrying thoughts,

Or obsessive thoughts,

Or remittative thoughts,

Or other types of thoughts that just suck us in,

Then it's like we're creating neural pathways that go along that pathway.

So neurologically,

It's happening.

If we choose to focus on something else,

Then what's happening is we're not feeding into that neural pathway,

So it's fading away.

It's becoming a non-existing neural pathway,

And we're feeding into another neural pathway.

It could be the fact that,

Ah,

It could be a thought like,

There's no need to worry about this.

I can feel chilled out here.

This is just my mind going crazy.

I can focus on this thing,

And it's all okay.

So we're strengthening that neural pathway.

So that's some way we can use serenity as a way of dealing with difficult thoughts.

And with insight,

It's a little bit different.

With insight,

We actually turn our attention to the experience.

But with insight,

It's important how we attend.

If we can attend mindfully to thoughts,

We begin to see their characteristics,

Their universal characteristics,

Which are,

If we can turn our attention to being mindful of thoughts,

I'll just turn this off,

Mindful of thoughts in that we see their impermanence.

If we see their uncertainty,

Their unreliability,

If we see their not-self nature,

We're actually looking at the universal characteristics of anicca dukkha anatta,

Anicca being impermanence,

Dukkha being unreliability or unsatisfactoriness,

And anatta meaning not-self,

But also interdependence.

So once we start to use our attention wisely,

We can start to see the true nature of thoughts.

So when we see thoughts are impermanent,

Well,

They're just an impermanent thought,

That's not going to last.

We can see that they're unreliable.

Hey,

They're not necessarily facts to be believed,

They're just thoughts.

And we can also see that they are not-self,

They're not necessarily who and what we are.

They're coming about because of a number of things,

We don't need to identify with them.

So that's liberating in and of itself.

I was going to go into the fourth hindrance,

But I'll say this much.

I'll just do it very quickly.

The fourth hindrance is restlessness and worry.

And many of you will know this hindrance.

It's when we get caught up in restlessness,

Our minds are all over the place.

There's an analogy of restlessness,

It's characteristic of disquiet,

Like water whipped by the wind,

Its function is unsteadiness,

Like a flag or a banner whipped by the wind.

It's manifested as turmoil,

Like ashes flung up by pelting with stones.

So it's just this fragmented restlessness.

The other feature of this fourth hindrance is worry.

This is a little bit different than the way I describe worry,

But it's often talked about as regret.

It has subsequent regret as a characteristic.

Its function is to sorrow about what was,

What has and has not been done.

It's more like rumination.

It's manifested as remorse.

Its proximal cause is what has and what has not been done.

It should be regarded as slavery.

This is this fourth hindrance.

It's a real barrier.

It's probably the hindrance that's most related to puncture and thinking and getting caught up in thinking processes.

Interestingly,

The Pali Canon says the primary cause of restlessness in worry is frequently giving inappropriate attention to unsettledness of mind.

Isn't that interesting?

Inappropriate attention,

Meaning we're feeding into it,

We're giving it nutriment.

If we give appropriate attention,

Being mindfulness,

We start to see through it.

We start to see it for what it is.

In knowing it,

We can let it go.

I've got three minutes,

Four minutes maybe.

I'm just going to bring up a sutta.

There's a lovely sutta called Vitika Santana Sutta.

It brackets the removal of distracting thoughts.

It's got five methods for dealing with thoughts.

This talk is a bit of a rehash of a talk I did a couple of years ago where I talked about these five methods.

I think Alan's given talks on these five methods at different times.

I'm just going to put them in the context of what we've been talking about.

The five methods are these.

One,

Replacing,

Like cognitive therapy.

With cognitive therapy,

What happens is we look at particularly unhelpful thinking patterns and we challenge them and then we replace those thinking patterns with more rational or realistic thinking patterns.

It's like that.

In our case,

We could say,

For example,

Replace thoughts of anger with thoughts of loving kindness,

If we can do that.

It's pretty hard to do that sometimes when you're really enraged with something.

It's hard to turn on loving kindness.

With practice,

It becomes a really wonderful way of dealing with ill will.

The next method is reflecting on the dangers of the thoughts.

What we feed into becomes our reality.

In other words,

If we can stop and step back and say,

Wow,

If I continue to think like this,

What's the reality that I'm creating?

I don't want this reality.

Then we tend not to feed into it.

We don't give it nourishment.

The next one is forgetting it.

Not giving it attention.

Ignore it and it will go away.

It's not quite like that.

It's not like a denial of it.

It's just not feeding into it.

It's like that method I said before,

Use it or lose it.

We're not giving it any attention.

We're not going to feed into it.

Therefore,

It just fades away.

That's a really useful method.

Stilling the mind with serenity.

This is another method.

In this case,

What happens is we might have all these thoughts happening,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

This and that,

Here you go,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

We just let them be on the edge of our awareness and we bring our attention to quietude and stillness.

It's so focused on an object that all that other stuff just fades away.

It just becomes completely irrelevant.

It doesn't seduce us.

We don't struggle with it.

It doesn't even come up.

Our minds become so quiet that it's really,

Really quiet and peaceful.

The last one,

And I love this,

It says,

Clenching,

Crushing mind with mind.

Putting in a contemporary approach,

It's not like this struggle with it.

It's just simply saying,

You might hear this crappy thought going on and you just say,

Nah,

Sorry,

Not me,

Not now,

I'm not doing it,

Just no,

Just no.

It's not quite crushing mind with mind,

But it's disagreeing with it and saying,

Nah,

I'm not going there.

Thanks very much.

I hope this little talk was helpful.

May you all be free from greed,

Ignorance and hatred in relationship to your thoughts.

Thank you.