It doesn’t take long when you start to develop a practice of mindfulness before you realize
that we are virtually continually bombarded by thoughts.
It’s... They’re like weather patterns in the mind,
and there are sometimes nice clear sunny days, but there are an awful lot of cloudy days,
tumultuous days, rainy days, turbulent, stormy weather.
And again, the challenge is, how are we to be in relationship to all of that stuff that’s
driving our lives and our narrative of who I am?
And so, when you get in touch with what awareness really is, then you’re... the first thing
you realize is that those thoughts are not me and they’re not mine.
They’re just like weather patterns.
They’re impersonal weather patterns in the mind.
So, then you can observe them like a scientist,
like, what is the nature of this thought?
Where does it come from?
I mean, they come like bullets, you know, fired out of a machine gun.
They’re very, very fast so to speak.
That’s quite a militaristic image but, you know, another way is bubbles coming off the
bottom of a pot of boiling water, you know.
If you’ve ever watched a pot of boiling water, say a glass pot, the bubbles tend to
nucleate at the bottom.
And then they go through the water and they go “poof” at the surface.
So the thoughts are very similar and that’s where I use another – people often
use this term that thoughts self-liberate.
You don’t have to get rid of them.
People misunderstand meditation as, “Oh I just sweep all my thoughts away and then I’m
in this, like, Nirvana.”
What you’ll get by trying to sweep all your thoughts away is a headache, at the most, because
there’s no way to sweep your thoughts away.
They will get you every time.
And then you can have millions of thoughts about mindfulness and meditation and those
are just thoughts, too.
They’re not meditating.
But when you see that you’re not your thoughts then you can watch them in this kind of impersonal,
more, sort of, if you will, observing way, with kindness, with self-compassion, because a lot
of them are heavily loaded with negative emotion.
And you can see that if you don’t touch them, if you don’t do anything with them,
if you don’t get caught in them they self-liberate naturally in awareness.
The awareness is like touching a soap bubble, you know.
It’s fun for kids and fun for adults too.
A soap bubble and you touch it and it just goes “poof”.
So I love that image like the thought is the soap bubble and the emotion too.
It’s valancing the thought.
And you don’t need to do anything with it because your awareness is like it’s not
even a finger, it’s not corporeal.
The awareness, just the embracing of it or the arising of it, like in the sky, it goes
“poof” all by itself.
And don’t take my word for it.
This is something that when you sit down and you begin to watch, you’ll see this is not
rocket science.
You don’t have to sit in a cave for 30 years to have that kind of experience.
All you need to do is, in some sense, get out of your own way.
Now I’m not saying that’s easy.
That’s really hard. But if you can have moments when you get out of your own way, then you’ll
see that a lot of the stuff that we get so caught up in it’s like – it’s a mirage.
And that doesn’t mean that the thoughts aren’t valuable.
I mean I think it was Einstein who said, you know, if you have one or two really good thoughts
in a lifetime you’re ahead of the curve.
...Paraphrasing...
So, most of our thoughts are actually kind of mundane or imprisoning.
But thinking is a very, very – I mean, it drives imagination, it drives creativity.
So maybe we need to just create a bigger arena for our thoughts and watch how they not only
self-liberate but also inform each other at some sense.
And all of a sudden you see something that no one in the history of humanity has seen
before.
And you apprehend it because you’re making your... or something is being revealed to you.
I won’t say you’re making the connection but somehow a connection gets made and that’s
called an insight.
You’re going to have profound insights.
I mean, the science is sort of storied, you know, wonderful stories of eureka moments,
insight and it’s usually not by driving, thinking and banging your head against the wall.
It’s when you thought as much as, you’ve gone as far as thought can take you, and then
you rest in awareness.
Maybe sometimes it’s in sleep where you wake up out of the sleep and then …[slap]