When we meditate one of the things we come to see is that we are not our thinking mind. We come to see that this mind is just a tool or instrument that we can utilize if we want to, but that we aren’t obliged to. This is an easy thing to say but it represents a one hundred and eighty degree turnaround from how we usually see things – usually the thinking mind is all we know (whether we realize this or not) and so it is pragmatically impossible for us to distinguish ourselves from our thinking, from our thoughts. If all we know is the thinking mind then of course we can’t distinguish ourselves or separate ourselves from it! On the contrary, we identify ourselves with it. We know ourselves through our thoughts, via the medium of our thoughts, and so what this means is that in our normal everyday state of being we are our thoughts. If all I know about myself I what I think about myself then this is just another way of saying that I am one of my own thoughts. If all I know is my conceptualization of the world, then this is as good as saying that that I am one of my own concepts! But in becoming a concept who I really am is lost.

 

The everyday thinking mind swallows everything up – it is like a giant invisible amoeba that absorbs everything it comes across and then replaces the originals with its own ideas or concepts of what they are. It duplicates (or ‘reproduces’) reality, in other words. This is a process that we never see happening because if we’re convinced that our idea about something is the same thing as the thing itself then how are we ever going to notice a transition? The principle here is that thinking about things is easy – it happens totally automatically, without us seeing it happening – but not thinking about things (i.e. not judging or evaluating the world) is hard because that doesn’t just ‘happen automatically’. Not evaluating or judging is the same thing as being conscious and consciousness is not a mechanical process. As long as we are going along with the thinking mind’s story (which as we have said proceeds quite automatically, quite without any volition on our part) then we will never know that it has ‘swallowed everything up’ and that we are as a consequence living in a world that is made up entirely from our ideas, our concepts, our judgements or evaluations.

 

When we live in a world that is made up entirely of our own thoughts then this of course means that we are at the mercy of our thoughts – if an agreeable thought comes along then we automatically feel good and if a disagreeable thought comes along then we equally automatically feel bad. Life therefore becomes a constant round of ‘up and down’ and all we can do is hope for more agreeable thoughts than disagreeable ones to come along. We can also of course attempt to steer things in this way by ‘trying to be positive’ but as experience shows this can only work for a short while (and if something only works for a short while this actually means that it isn’t working at all). And even the so-called ‘positive thoughts’ aren’t all that they are cracked up to be! They are brittle at best. The rewarding feeling that we get as a result of buying into them is very transient and very precarious – it can be gone in a flash if circumstances change or if another more powerful thought comes along. They can turn around on us in a moment – the comfort thought gives us is fickle to say the least and it all too easily switches around and becomes discomfort…

 

The ‘good feeling’ that comes with positive thinking isn’t realistic in other words – it depends upon a particular slanted way of looking at the world seeming right to us, seeming correct to us, but who is to say that the corresponding negative way of looking at things may not also seem right to us a bit later on? So-called ‘positive and negative thoughts’ function exactly like flattery and insults – if we’re susceptible to being made to feel good by flattery then by the same token we’re going to be equally susceptible to being made to feel bad by any insult that comes our way. We get the soft end of the stick to be sure but we’re also going to get the rough end too in equal measure and the pleasure we get from the former is always going to be balanced out by the pain caused by the latter. How after all can we control the world to make sure that we only ever come across flattery? Even if we can control what people say to us (even if we can manage our environment so that it is always convivial to us) all this means is that we are setting ourselves up for a fall since life itself will level a few good insults at us sooner or later and no amount of money or charm or power or technology can protect us from that!

 

Another way of looking at why the so-called ‘positive states of mind’ that come about as a result of the thinking process working the way we want it to aren’t reliable is to see them as essentially being ‘agitations of an underlying medium’. All mental states that are linked to thought are ‘agitated states of mind’. There are two forms of agitation possible – one is an agitation that makes us excited in what we would call a ‘positive’ or ‘euphoric’ way, the other is an agitation that causes us to be excited in a ‘negative’ or ‘dysphoric’ way. Either it’s one form of excitement or it’s the other; there is no excitement that isn’t either positive or negative. Agitation of any sort is inherently unreliable however – agitated states of mind are unreliable because they it can (and will) give way to their opposite at the drop of a hat. To be up one minute is to be down the next. The one thing that can never happen as a result of the thinking process, as a result of our thoughts, is that we will find a balance in ourselves, a place where we are not at the mercy of every arbitrary thought that comes along. Or as we could also say, the one thing that we can never obtain for ourselves as a result of our thinking is stillness.

 

The reason we can’t find stillness within ourselves as a result of thinking is because stillness (or ‘peace of mind’) can never be created (or acquired) by thought. All thought can ever do is come up with positive or negative statements, positive and negative certainties. Thought can either say “It is!” or “It isn’t!” and neither of these is stillness because stillness isn’t a tug of war between two opposites – it isn’t ‘one opposite trying to win out over the other, complementary opposite’. That isn’t stillness, that is conflict, that is war! The activity of the thinking mind results in tension between the two poles which it itself takes for granted (which it has to take for granted in order to function at all) and this tension results in a never-ending agitation or disturbance. The struggle or conflict between one opposite and the other isn’t meaningful – it is a quintessentially meaningless type of conflict! The reason we can say that it is ‘quintessentially meaningless’ is because the opposites (any opposites) don’t have any independent existence outside of each other. The one opposite is only meaningful in relation to the other, and vice versa. The one opposite only makes sense in terms of the other. What does ‘up’ mean without a ‘down’, after all? Or ‘win’ without a ‘lose’, or a ‘YES’ without a ‘NO’?

 

When we struggle to affirm one opposite at the expense of another therefore (as we are so very prone to doing) we are not just affirming the one we want to affirm (i.e. the ‘positive’ one), we are affirming the whole set-up, we are ‘reinforcing both opposites equally’. We’re putting energy into the opposite we like, the opposite we’re in favour of, and at the same time we’re putting energy into the one we don’t like, the one we aren’t in favour of. We’re adding more and more momentum to the spinning wheel of YES-NO-YES-NO-YES-NO, the spinning wheel of UP followed by DOWN followed by UP… We’re giving more and more energy to the spinning wheel of the thinking mind. The more we try to control the situation (i.e. the more mental activity we engage in) the faster the wheel is going to spin, until the spinning itself becomes revealed as pain, or suffering. And when we get to thinking about this, and thinking about how we can stop the crazy spinning, all we are doing is making it spin faster! We can spin our way into stress and conflict and suffering without any problem at all but the one thing we can’t do is spin our way into happiness, spin our way into stillness…

 

As we have been saying, the thinking mind very quickly gets the better of us, gains the upper hand, and causes us to perceive the reality that it creates with its non-stop activity as being ‘the only reality’. It subsumes everything within it in other words, and as a result everything we do only serves to make the situation worse. Everything we do and think simply tangles us up more with the thinking mind, and makes that mind more powerful. But the spinning wheel that is the thinking mind isn’t the only reality. It isn’t ‘all that there is’. The spinning wheel is spinning in space and that space is not something that was created by our thoughts. Space is not a construct of thought. ‘Space’ is actually another way of talking about stillness and – as we keep saying – thoughts can never give rise to stillness. To see that we are not the thinking mind represents the introduction of a most extraordinary new element in the mix, therefore. It represents the element of freedom!

 

If we are not the thinking mind (and if the reality that is created by this mind is not the only reality) then this means we have more than just the two possibilities of saying YES or saying NO open to us. It is no longer just a question of affirming the situation or denying it – we are no longer restricted to the possibility of ‘straining to obtain the positive’ or ‘struggling to avoid the negative’, both of which – as we have said – only serve to fuel the momentum of the spinning wheel. The other possibility is for us to see that we are not our thoughts and that the world which is created by our thinking isn’t the only world. We can start to see that we are not this mind-created self which is always striving to obtain the positive outcome and push away the negative. Both the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ outcome equal this mind-created self – it is only the mind of attachment that sees everything in terms of ‘what I want’ and ‘what I don’t want’, after all. What the thinking mind says are the only two possibilities that are open to us (i.e. affirm or deny, say YES or say NO, ‘like’ or ‘dislike’) are therefore revealed to be ‘only what the thinking mind says is possible’, and the thinking mind is revealed as not being the whole story!

 

To put all this in just a few words, when we see that we aren’t the thinking mind we are free from that mind, free from that limited set of possibilities that just goes around and around. We’re free to step out of the cage of our concepts, the cage of our ideas. When we see that we aren’t the thinking mind – and that we don’t have to be thinking non-stop the whole time – this means that we are now aware of a much bigger world than the world which thought had shown us. We are aware of an incomparably vaster world. This ‘incomparable vaster world’ isn’t all about right and wrong, like and dislike, YES and NO. It isn’t all about the mind-created self, the ‘narrow-minded controller’. Seeing that we aren’t the thinking mind (and that the world which this mind creates isn’t the only world) is the same thing as seeing that who we are really is the stillness within which the wheel of thought is spinning. So no matter what is happening, no matter what triggers might be there, we don’t have to ‘DO’ anything! We don’t have to keep on going around and around on the spinning wheel. We are free just to ‘be’…