My Thoughts on Thoughts in Meditation
On looking, locating and letting go
The Problem of Looking With Your Eyes
Whenever I start a session — whenever I close my eyes — the first thing that dominates the arena of consciousness is the sphere of space I assume is my visual field.
This space has no real size or boundary, yet the sense of this boundlessness is never immediate.
At first, it always seems like everything is bunched in the middle, with some amorphous edge that sits at the edge of my eyeballs.
But when I focus on what I think is the edge and make that the centre of my focus, the edge instantaneously shifts to being the same distance from this new centre as it was before.
This I’ve already discussed, and perhaps it’s to be expected when looking around the infinite space of consciousness;
What’s strange isn’t the absence of edges in infinite space, but the fact that when I look for edges, I use my eyes to do the looking.
The same thing happens when I try to focus on a sound or pain — my eyes move to the apparent location of the sensation.
This is strange.
Because even though the sound or pain may be coming from a location in space or area of my body, it’s not there in consciousness.
Tilting Into Infinity
Try focusing on a particular sensation — something that seems to have a location, like the cold or warm feeling of your hands.
Then tilt your head up while still focusing on that feeling, and you’ll notice that the distance to that sensation from the apparent centre of your awareness doesn’t change (at least in my experience).
The feeling of my hands always seems to stay in the centre-bottom of the space of consciousness — the sense of their location in consciousness doesn’t change.
It’s as if by tilting my head back I can extend infinity.
So if that feeling is always in the same location in consciousness no matter where I move my eyes, why do I move my eyes to look at it?
The visual field is not in the visual field, it’s in the same space as every other sensation: in consciousness, without any particular location.
Hence, noticing a sensation has nothing to do with trying to locate it in space.
Because you do not need to find it.
Looking For Your Eyes
Being able to realise this helps in the task of looking for what’s looking — the part that seems to be the you in all of this.
When I notice this feeling of looking — the feeling of being the observer — it feels like I’m perched upon the edge of consciousness, somehow looking at my mind.
But if I can notice all this, then I’m actually looking at that.
When I make this realisation, there’s a split second where what’s observed seems to be the observer, but then it quickly becomes something else.
It’s not that it changes — in its pseudo-visual sense — but that I get snapped back to the feeling of being an observer looking at the things in consciousness, as if the edge has been stretched out further, but I’m once again perched upon it.
But then this new feeling of being an observer once again becomes the object observed, and the cycle seems to repeat.
An this exercise seems infinitely repeatable, and it seems to capture much of what meditation is:
Find the feeling of being an observer.
Observe it.
Repeat.
The Bewildering River of Thoughts
The other major star in the arena of consciousness is the bewildering river of thoughts.
This is the predominant state of being, and when you first start to meditate, the rapidity with which you fall into the river is frustrating.
And the frustration itself becomes another source of frustration, because we think meditation is meant to be about being relaxed and equanimous, and here you are petty and frustrated at being frustrated.
But really, this frustration is no less a hinderance to the practice of meditation than being lost in thought itself.
Frustration itself is just another thought, and being absorbed by it is just once again being lost in it.
The Effort of Not Trying
This frustration is usually the result of vainly spent effort.
But, in the context of meditation, what is effort?
If everything is just there to notice, what is the point of “trying” to notice it?
When I’m “trying” to meditate, I usually become aware of tension in my shoulders and neck, like I’m squeezing my mind as I would my eyes when trying to focus on something in the distance.
But if the point of meditation is to notice, and I can notice all these sensations of tension and pain that constitute the sense of “trying”, then surely this “trying” is extraneous to the act of noticing, and therefore unnecessary for it.
In fact, relaxation is the active part of meditation, not the effect of it; trying too hard to relax rapidly becomes its opposite.
Learning to let go of tension in the body is an important way to learn how to let go of thoughts in the mind. The action is almost indistinguishable.
Meditation is a practice. It’s just not one that requires effort.
Swimming Up The River
The problem is that meditation is often perceived — and often becomes — an attempt to hold back thoughts.
This is like trying to swim upstream in the river of thoughts in an effort not to drown in them.
But that’s not meditation, and that’s not the point.
Meditation is simply watching the river of thoughts flow past without getting washed out in the deluge.
The goal isn’t to try and swim, the goal is to learn how to float, until the river slows to a trickle and you find yourself sat on the bank, or you realise you were never in the river to begin with.
On The Banks of The River
When you can find yourself on the banks, you can start to consider the questions of:
What is a thought? And what does it mean to be lost in one?
If I watch one do its thing and just let it be without trying to avoid it, it usually progresses like any other thought would, but it doesn’t fill the entire arena of consciousness.
With this I get a more visceral sense of what is usually only an intellectual acknowledgement:
I am not thinking; thoughts are happening.
They arise without me doing anything.
Getting lost in thought is simply a failure to notice this.
Retracing Steps
If you get lost, I have an interesting way to get back.
There’s an exercise I would often do when I was younger — something I was never taught, just a challenge I spontaneously set for myself and one that always seemed rewarding, important and useful.
Whenever I found myself in the midst of some thought that I had no idea how I came to — as would happen often — I would start skipping back through the thoughts in reverse until I found myself at the last thought I remember being aware in.
I couldn’t do the jump all at once, but each thought seemed to contain within it the key to the previous one, and it usually wasn’t too difficult to find a passage to it, and then find the key to the next previous one, and so on, until I found myself back at the start.
I wasn’t always able to get all the way back — sometimes I would lose the trail and sometimes I couldn’t find the key, and the next previous thought would sit like words on the tip of my tongue out of reach.
The Final Thought
This little exercise taught me something about thoughts:
The more I scanned back through them, the more they seemed just objects of consciousness, and the less they seemed to
define me.
I haven’t known anyone else to ever do this, and I haven’t heard it discussed in anything to do with meditation, so I can’t reliably claim that it has any benefit.
I also can’t explain why it felt rewarding; you just have to try it for yourself.
That’s also true of meditation.
You could think of the exercise as a kind of meditation; and it’s at least a good metaphor for it:
If you find yourself lost in thought:
Just retrace your steps.
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