Can you hear without thinking?
Nothing I'm saying requires any thinking.
In these pauses,
Can you resist the temptation to think?
Can you resist the temptation of narrating something?
What I'm asking you to do is to take a step back.
Thinking,
Chit-chatting,
Narrating,
Commentary is a way of indulgence.
Nearly hear.
Nearly listen.
With your eyes open,
I want you to look around,
Wherever you are,
And merely see,
Without reading anything,
If you see any words around you,
Without narrating what is happening.
Oh,
This is a switch,
That's a door.
No,
Just see.
This instruction should expose the talking-to-yourself syndrome.
Constantly talking-to-yourself syndrome.
Of course,
If you look online,
You will not find anything,
I just made it up.
But that's what is happening.
Commentary,
Narration,
Thinking,
Talking to someone else in your mind,
As if there is someone else in your mind,
All these are just a pathology of talking to yourself.
So simple experience of listening and seeing is tainted.
So merely listen.
Merely see.
Merely feel your body and whatever is appearing,
As sensations or feelings in your body.
This habit of talking-to-yourself is constantly interfering with our everyday experience.
When we are talking to our co-workers,
To our children,
To our family,
We are busy talking to ourselves most of the times,
Even when the other person is speaking.
Like right now,
You might catch yourself thinking while I am speaking.
The rationale from the mind,
Who is engaging in this thoughtless thinking,
Would be,
Could be,
That without this,
You can't understand,
You can't learn,
You won't be able to explain it to someone else.
And yes,
There is a place for that.
But right now,
I don't want you to explain it to anyone else.
I don't want you to learn anything and I don't want you to break down anything.
My words are very straightforward,
The meaning of which is understood effortlessly.
Do not let this façade from your mind interfere with pausing the self-talk.
It seems that the culture around us is aware of this self-talk,
The voice in the head.
But it's only concerned with the negative self-talk that is going on and that needs to be changed to positive self-talk.
But I am questioning the fundamental self-talk itself,
Even the harmless chitter-chatter.
It's not necessary.
You can hear without thinking,
You can listen without thinking,
You can see without thinking,
You can feel without thinking.
And because there is no other separation between thinking,
Actual thinking for practical reasons,
For problem-solving,
For preparation,
The needed thinking,
And this thoughtless,
Mindless thinking,
I am creating this new phrase,
Which is self-talk.
So that we don't throw the thinking away with the bathwater,
Or we don't throw the baby along with the bathwater out.
In this analogy,
Baby being the thinking faculty.
But most of our quote-unquote thinking is merely self-talk.
That is dumbing our listening,
Seeing,
Feeling experience.
Because if we zoomed in on how this self-talk dumbs our experience,
Would be to see that when you hear something,
When you see something,
When you feel something,
For a second or two,
For a moment,
You experience it purely,
And then you start thinking about it,
And the mind is creating this illusion that you are seeing,
You are listening,
You are feeling,
But actually you are thinking about seeing,
About listening,
About feeling.
Feeling the sadness is not the same as thinking about the feeling of sadness.
Seeing your room,
The objects in your room,
The wall,
The door,
The doorknob,
The buttons,
Is not the same as labeling the door,
The doorknob,
The objects in your room.
Because when you label,
You are in the concept of it.
That's what language has done.
It has collapsed the object into its concept.
The territory has been collapsed into a map.
So the word apple is not the experience of apple.
So we often find ourselves in concepts under the pretense that we are with the actual experience.
And we spend enormous amount of time in our mind thinking,
Rather than seeing,
Hearing,
Feeling,
Tasting,
Touching,
And this habit is so deep rooted within us,
Within all of us,
That we have hardly had the experience of being silent internally being silent.
And yes,
There is a route that some people take where they try to stop all thoughts.
Thoughts are not a problem.
Thinking is.
And there is a big difference between thoughts and thinking.
Thoughts appear as images,
As sounds in our mind.
Mostly images,
At least for me.
It reminds me of drinking tea or coffee or water.
The image pops up and I go and do it.
Thinking is the voluntary leaning in and proliferating that initial cloud of thought that appeared The thought appears on its own.
The cloud appears on its own.
When we lean in,
We proliferate it as thinking.
So thoughts are not a problem.
This constant indulgence of thoughts into thinking,
Talking,
Negotiating,
Justifying,
Rationalizing,
Criticizing,
Judging or merely commenting,
Narrating.
All this happens through our volition,
Through our freedom.
The richness of life lies in the actual experience of perceiving,
That is,
Seeing,
Listening,
Tasting,
Touching,
Smelling,
Feeling,
Sensing.
Thinking is the abstraction of it.
It's navigating the map constantly than navigating the territory.
You know,
Sometimes I'm sitting on the couch and nodding my head and my wife asks me,
What are you saying no to?
And I realize that I was actually part of a conversation in the mind and I was disagreeing with them.
The abstract feels so real that we enter this virtual world and assume that it is real.
It might even feel like we are sucked in to this world.
But once you keep taking a step back from this indulgence,
You will see the volition and freedom in it.
The biggest achievement,
And this is purely my opinion,
The biggest achievement in life is to be able to experience this quiet mind not out of discipline or stopping of thoughts,
But out of our freedom of not indulging.
This is just a habit,
Decades of habit.
Unfortunately,
We have not done this habit once per day or something like that.
We have done it almost multiple times a minute for decades.
But today could be an inflection point in our lives.
Where the habit starts eroding.
For a few seconds in a day we can taste true silence so that we can see it for ourselves that silence is accessible to us.
That we are not victims of this virtual world sucking us in.
We can be in this reality.
We can be in the territory as long as we wish.
The illusion and the delusion of the map the abstraction,
The concept,
The name of that thing is not where we want to spend our entire life.
Thank you.
