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Guided Meditation: Thinking vs Knowing

Welcome to our meditation time together and teaching. I want to make a distinction that I believe is very helpful for meditation and for life in general, in relationship to thinking. Very often, what we call thinking—discursive thinking, conversational thinking, telling stories, figuring things out—is thinking about something. Listen to this little expression: "thinking about something."

Distinct from that is our capacity to know. Knowing is a kind of cognitive experience that may be subliminal, maybe not with an inner voice, but there is a kind of cognitive knowing. The difference between "thinking about something" and "knowing something" is the word "about."

When we're thinking about something, we're removed from it. We're at a distance from something; we're abstracting from something. It's a little bit of a virtual world when we're thinking about something.

Knowing something is a much quieter part of the mind. We know much more than we ever think about, but we take it so much for granted. If you sit down to eat, you don't think about which utensil to use to eat the food. You don't analyze the situation carefully and consider whether it's the fork or the spoon for the soup. You just know it. You know it's a chair you sat down at. You know the table. These are very simple things that we know, and we're not abstracting about them or standing at a distance usually. It is often so subliminal and quiet; it feels almost effortless to do.

Mindfulness meditation is shifting from thinking about things to knowing things—knowing what can be known. Knowing is really something that is in the present moment. We can think about something that happened yesterday, and we can think about what might happen tomorrow, but to really know, that experience of knowing in Buddhist language has to do with our direct experience. What we can know now. So it is a shift to two different kinds of thinking. Sometimes this knowing does involve words or images that are very, very simple about what's happening in the present moment.

Let's see if we can spend this meditation time closer to knowing than to thinking about things. Take a meditation posture and close your eyes.

Based on my words about this difference between thinking about and knowing: what is known for you now, in this most simple way in which things are known? Without judgment, analysis, or even without putting value on anything, without preferences, just the knowing.

What is known in your experience of your body? If you have no preferences for what you know, what is known right now in your body? What appears and is known?

If you have no preferences for what you feel, what you should be feeling, or where you notice feelings, what feelings and emotions are simply known? They appear and are here, and they're known.

What sounds around you appear and are simply known in the simplicity of those sounds, without needing to think about the sounds?

And then there's breathing. If you allow whatever the experience of breathing is for you to occur, what is known, what is recognized about breathing, without needing to think about the breathing? Moment by moment, there's something new that is known. And you don't have to do anything with what is known. Knowing the physical sensations of breathing: the movements of the chest, the belly, the air going in now through the nostrils. Perhaps you can let go and relax into the physical experience of breathing, sensing, and feeling.

And then very relaxedly, rest in the continuity, the relaxed continuity of knowing the experience of breathing. Try not to think about what that means to know, just whatever simple way that it is for you. Simple knowing, recognition. It might be with words, single mental notes. It might be no words at all. But there is a kind of knowing of the experience of the present moment as it unfolds.

If you get involved in thinking about something, be curious. When you recognize that, there's a simple knowing about that as well. Simple knowing prior to further thinking about it. Just the knowing.

And for this sitting, can you trust the simplicity of knowing what unfolds in the present moment? Can you learn more about the distinction between thinking about something versus knowing something?

To stay with the knowing is to keep it really simple. To think about what's happening probably begins to make it more complicated than it needs to be. Trust the knowing. Stay with the breathing or whatever your experiences are, and be content to know it as present moment experience for when it is present. And if it goes away, or something else replaces it, be content to let it go. Trust the knowing of what arises in awareness.

If you're thinking about something, feel the difference between the world of aboutness and the world of direct knowing. In a sense, knowing arises out of silence. Knowing arises out of space. The more stillness in the mind, the more we feel the preciousness of each moment of knowing.

And then to end this sitting: what is your direct experience and knowing of love, of kindness? When there's caring, you care for someone, what is the knowing of care? The knowing of love and kindness and care: from where within does it arise and be known?

May it be that the wellsprings of love, care, and kindness support you in being free, in not closing down or becoming contracted or caught in resentments, annoyance, hate, fear, desires, or lust.

May it be that this meditation of ours helps us to tap into that knowing, that deep knowing from which love arises. And may it be expressed in the world. May it be that our love doesn't just live inside us, but gets transformed, expressed, and manifested in action. May it be that in our words, in our deeds, and in our mind, in our thoughts when we think about things—may it be for the welfare of others, for the welfare of ourselves, for the welfare of self and others, and the welfare of the whole world.

May all beings be happy. May all beings have the conditions for their love and compassion to flow. May all beings have the conditions for safety and health. May all beings everywhere be free.