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Working with the Thinking Mind

How's the sound? Can you hear me? Great. Welcome. My name is Walt Opie. I'm a guest teacher. Diana Clark has been away this month, but I think she might be back soon. I normally teach at Sacramento Insight. I live in Berkeley, but I am one of the main teachers for Sacramento Insight at the moment, and I do a lot of other teaching as well. Some of my training was here with Gil Fronsdal. I did the intro to Buddhist chaplaincy program here quite a few years ago, and I've done some work in prisons and Santa Rita jail as a Buddhist chaplain of sorts.

Tonight I thought I would start with a poem. I know that Diana sometimes does that. We're actually going to teach a daylong here on October 24th, bringing poetry and practice together—just a day to explore poetry. I heard about this poem from the Zen teacher Paul Haller. He's from the San Francisco Zen Center and was one of the co-teachers with Gil of the Buddhist chaplaincy program when I took it. [Laughter] Anyway, this is a poem by Seamus Heaney^[1], an Irish poet. I love the title, Had I Not Been Awake. Apparently, he woke up in the middle of the night, and this is describing what happened.

Had I not been awake I would have missed it, A wind that rose and whirled until the roof Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore And got me up, the whole of me a-patter, Alive and ticking like an electric fence: Had I not been awake I would have missed it, It came and went so unexpectedly And almost it seemed dangerously, Returning like an animal to the house, A courier blast that there and then lapsed ordinary. But not ever after. And not now.

He's basically describing some kind of strong wind that suddenly hit the house and knocked some leaves off that were hitting the roof. You just happen to wake up and hear it and experience that direct contact at the sense door. We're going to talk about this later in the talk, but just direct contact at the sense door is part of our practice. Paul Haller said that this is a poem about sati^[2] or mindfulness to him. I love that just that first line, "Had I not been awake I would have missed it." I feel like we could all write a little Buddhist poem starting with that line if this were a writing class, which it's not.

The poem captures a sudden jolt of awareness, using the violent, unexpected rush of wind and leaves as a metaphor for a reawakening of the poet's vitality and creative spirit. I'm using it as a metaphor for when we might be meditating and we just get lost in a proliferation of thought. We're thinking about something from the past, or we're planning for later tonight or tomorrow, and we're really caught up in it. Then all of a sudden, maybe there's an unexpected sound—like somebody's phone goes off—and we wake up and realize, "Oh, I've really been lost in thought, but now I'm back." We can have that sense that we missed whatever was happening until we came out of that moment.

To me, a lot of the practice is starting to value those moments of coming out of all that proliferation of thought and really training ourselves to be more and more present with just what's here. I gave a talk about a similar topic not that long ago, and somebody came up and said that it was a pretty basic talk, but they enjoyed it. But I've been doing this practice for multiple decades, and this is still cutting-edge practice. We're always dealing with this thinking mind, so we need to figure out what the Buddha said about how to work with this. I thought I would explore this from a few different angles tonight, and then hopefully we'll open it up and have time for some discussion about it.

There are four foundations of mindfulness that the Buddha pointed us to—areas to really focus our mindfulness practice on. The first is the body, for obvious reasons. I think it's a good starting place, and that includes the breath and this body. Feeling tone (vedanā)^[3] is the second one. That's when something happens at the sense door, and we experience it as pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, or maybe painful. If it's pleasant, we tend to think, "Oh, that's nice, let's have more of that." If it's unpleasant, or especially if it's painful, we think, "This is horrible, get me out of here. We do not want anything painful or unpleasant." If it's neutral, we barely notice it often and just gloss over it. This is an area that the Buddha really encouraged us to pay more attention to, and that can be very fruitful.

The third foundation of mindfulness is about thought, mindfulness of the mind (citta)^[4]. Gil has a book called Everything is Practice. It's a retreat guide I just noticed in the library here, and he talks about this third foundation of mindfulness in that book. He says that this foundation has us focusing our attention on the general state of mind or mood that's present, often a more intimate and personal aspect of life than just the body or even feeling tone, which is fairly impersonal. We want to be aware of whether our state of mind is tense or relaxed. That's one way to look at it. Or also contracted or expansive. Or we could say happy, sad, dissatisfied, or content. This could be just the first basic way we start to tune into the mindfulness of this thinking mind [Laughter] and the moods that are present.

In the Majjhima Nikaya (the Middle Length Discourses), discourse number 19 is called Two Kinds of Thought (Dvedhavitakka Sutta). The Buddha said that before his enlightenment, he noticed that he could put his thoughts into two different categories. There were the unwholesome, unskillful thoughts that kept coming up related to sense desire, ill will, anger, hostility, or even cruelty. The other type of thoughts were the more wholesome and skillful thoughts—thoughts of kindness, goodwill, compassion, and non-ill will. For him, that was a big distinction that he started to make in his practice. We want to learn how to feed the wholesome, skillful ones and stop feeding the unwholesome, unskillful ones. [Laughter]

He also said, addressing the bhikkhus^[5]—which I'm told isn't necessarily just monks, but means any sincere practitioner—"Bhikkhus, whatever a bhikkhu frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of their mind." If we frequently think and ponder upon thoughts of sensual desire, we're not thinking about thoughts of renunciation, and we're just caught in thinking about sensual desire. I think that's one of the most powerful lines in all of the early discourses: whatever we frequently think and ponder upon, that will become the inclination of the mind. That's why we have a dharma center, right? So we can come and be reminded to think about dharma rather than what we're going to watch on Netflix. It may seem rather basic, but for me, it's been very useful to remember to keep coming back to these wholesome, skillful thoughts and not get so carried away by the unwholesome, unskillful ones.

Joseph Goldstein had a slightly different take on this that I like in his book Insight Meditation. He said, "For the purpose of meditation, nothing is particularly worth thinking about. Not our childhood, not our relationships, not the great novel we always wanted to write. This doesn't mean that such thoughts will not come. In fact, they may come with tremendous frequency. We do not need to fight with them or struggle against them or judge them. Rather, we can simply choose not to follow the thoughts once we are aware that they have arisen. The quicker we notice that we are thinking, the quicker we can see thoughts' empty nature."

When you're caught in thinking, you might ask, "What is a thought?" Because we don't often ask that question, we just tend to believe whatever is coming up in the mind. We don't question it. So I think it's an interesting thing to do, just asking, "What is a thought?" In a talk, Joseph said when we're mindful of thoughts, they have no power at all over us, because we're aware, "Oh, it's just thoughts coming." But when we're not aware, that's when we need to look out. We start believing all kinds of things that may or may not be true. This is a very powerful aspect of practice, to really start to be more aware of the thinking mind. [Laughter]

I can't say I fully understand this Zen story I'm about to share, but I like it anyway. There's a famous Zen dialogue from the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye by Zen Master Dogen^[6]. It says, when Yaoshan was sitting, a monk asked him, "In steadfast sitting, what do you think?" Take that to mean: in meditation, what do you think? What are you thinking? Yaoshan said, "Think not-thinking." The monk said, "How do you think not-thinking?" Yaoshan replied, "Beyond thinking."

There was a commentary: in contrast to thinking and not-thinking, beyond thinking (or non-thinking) describes the unrestricted mind in zazen^[7] where one tries neither to develop nor to suppress thoughts, which are continually arising. Another teacher said, "Think zazen." For us, we might consider mindfulness or being aware of the thoughts, like Joseph pointed to. If we're aware of the thoughts, then they don't have the same power over us, and we start to get beyond the thoughts because we're able to just see them arising and passing away.

I spent some time at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center this summer. They've recently had to evacuate it, I hear, because of the wildfires. But it had a profound impact on me because I'd always heard about it and had never visited before. It was beautiful to touch back into that practice of Zen, which I hadn't really done in quite a long time because I've been focused more on insight meditation. It's a really beautiful place, and that's where I encountered this Zen dialogue.

There's also a poem that Dogen wrote on seclusion. It's almost like he was at Tassajara when he wrote this, but he obviously was not, because it didn't exist yet. He was probably somewhere in Japan. He wrote:

Evening zazen hours advance. Sleep hasn’t come yet. More and more I realize mountain forests Are good for efforts in the Way. Sounds of the valley brook enter the ears; Moonlight pierces the eyes. Outside this, [Laughter] Not one further instant of thought.

There's a brook that runs behind the cabins at Tassajara, so that's one of the main things you can hear at night. There was a beautiful moon when I was there as well. I just love that you can feel the quietness of his mind in that poem. I love how this practice can help us learn to not be so lost in these proliferating thoughts. When we can have that, the mind can quiet down, and then we're able to just be here, wherever we are, in a more present way. I find this is what I value more and more in my life that I didn't really understand before I had this practice.

There's a concept called papañca^[8], which is the Pali word we usually translate as "proliferation of thought." There's a famous passage in a sutta called the Honeyball Sutta (Madhupindika Sutta). It says, "Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises." This could be something that happens at the eyes, ears, tongue, nose, body, or the mind—the six sense doors in Buddhism. So, dependent on the eye (or any sense door) and forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is called contact. The three being the eye, the forms, and the eye-consciousness (the eye's ability to know).

With contact as condition, there is feeling tone, which is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. For example, if I suddenly bang the bell in an unskillful way, you might have an unpleasant feeling tone when you hear that. What one feels, that one perceives. With perceiving, we're putting things in categories. A bird chirps, and we think, "Oh, bird chirping." If we're a birder—like my brother, who is really good—we might know what the bird is. I'm afraid I do not have that ability, but it's always impressive. Anyway, we categorize whatever is happening. This is perception at work.

Then this sutta says, "What one perceives, that one thinks about." We might hear the bird chirping, and then we might think, "Oh, the smoke alarm at home keeps going off. I really need to change the battery." And it's like, "Batteries are such a hassle. Why don't they last longer? It was such a hassle to get rid of batteries. Oh, I remember finding those batteries in my drawer that had been there for ten years, and the acid seeped out, and that was a hassle to clean up." We can just keep going and going, right? That's the thinking.

"What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates. With what one has mentally proliferated as the source, perceptions and notions tinged by mental proliferation beset one with respect to past, future, and present forms cognizable through the eye." The translation of that would be that we go from being aware of what's happening in the moment at the sense doors to just being completely lost in thought. We're not really present anymore. The Buddha diagrammed it out for us in this beautiful way that is worth paying attention to because we tend to have a lot of habitual patterns around how this operates.

Guy Armstrong, another teacher of mine, has a book called Emptiness. He says, "Other perceptions and thoughts now beset us quite apart from our wishes or intentions. Who has not experienced this?" So part of the problem is we just get caught up with the natural habits we have. We may have intended to be very present and awake and aware, but we get caught and lost in thought. This is not to say that this is terrible. It's very natural. But I find that the more I understand how this is operating, the less I have to get caught by it. We start to have the ability to not get so lost in these. He also mentions that this can bring a raft of disturbing emotions. We get lost in all these thoughts about past, present, or future. We remember an old failed relationship, and the next thing you know, we're feeling the sadness of that time in our lives. It's interesting how it all works.

What is also important is that the Buddha talked about how we can direct our thoughts. We don't have to just be caught in this proliferation all the time; we can actually cultivate the ability to bring in directed, intentional thought. For example, one trick I heard was if your mind is really busy while you're meditating, you can do a short gratitude list, and for some reason that can really help quiet the mind. I do that sometimes, where you just think of two or three things that you can be genuinely grateful for in this moment. It brings things back to this wholesomeness that the Buddha told us can be [Laughter] very useful.

Or if we're generating thoughts of ill will towards somebody, one of the tricks can be to remember their good qualities. When we're caught in some kind of ill will or negativity, if we suddenly remember, "Oh, but remember that time they drove me to the airport at 4:00 in the morning and they really didn't have to do that?" The next thing you know, it's pretty hard to stay mad at the person if you start to remember all the positive things they've done for us.

One of the messages is that the more we practice with this, we start to befriend our own mind. Anne Lamott^[9] famously said, "My mind is a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone." That quote always resonated with me because my mind was a pretty bad neighborhood for a long time. But through years of this practice, I feel like I'm not afraid of the neighborhood of my own mind anymore. It's become a lot more pleasant to spend time in, shall we say. I would encourage you to practice with these things.

Because a lot of our negative thoughts tend to be some version of self-criticism, Kristin Neff^[10], who's done a lot of work around self-compassion, writes a quote that has always been helpful, kind of the opposite of the mind being a bad neighborhood. She says: "I slowly came to realize that self-criticism, despite being socially sanctioned, was not at all helpful and in fact only made things worse. I wasn't making myself a better person by beating myself up all the time. Instead, I was causing myself to feel inadequate and insecure, then taking out my frustration on the people closest to me." I find that to be a useful reminder that self-criticism tends to just put us in a worse frame of mind.

Getting back to the "beyond thinking" idea, Ajahn Amaro^[11]—a British Thai Forest monk in the Ajahn Chah tradition, who is an abbot at a monastery in England—has written about understanding and relating to thought and conceptual proliferation. He says, "One of the biggest problems with thoughts is that we tend to believe everything that they say. If I am thinking it, it must be true. But actually, our thoughts are just a collection of habitual judgments, perceptions, memories, and ideas that are fed through consciousness. They may have some relationship with truth, but they may not. If we take as a baseline the notion that most of our thoughts are like the random barking of a dog, we make less out of them. And therein lies the sense of relief. And then we find that we can relate to thought in a much more open way. We're not looking at it as being meaningful or true, and we're not giving it a value beyond what it really has."

[Laughter]

He also says, "Most of our thoughts are like dreams. Occasionally, perhaps once or twice a year—hopefully it's a little more than that—we may have a dream that is significant and we know it. We may not know exactly what it is about, but it's pretty clear that there's a message in it. But the other 364 days a year, it's just the leftovers of the day. There's nothing particularly significant or important about any of our dream content at all. It's just the residue, the echoes of the day's events and activities."

Then he says, "When we look at thought in this way, we aren't being pulled into it. We can just look at it. We don't reject it or suppress it, but we don't buy into it either. We don't make more out of it than is there. This attitude of listening, of opening to and receiving thought, has a liberating quality in and of itself."

Then he goes on to say that it's important that we put as much or more emphasis on the one who is knowing. The real key I'm pointing to is that there is all this thought content bubbling up all the time, and we can get caught in the content ("she said this", "he did that"). Or we can see that as just noise, and we can start to tune in more to the one knowing the sound, the awareness knowing the thoughts that are proliferating. Ajahn Amaro ends by saying that this is what will get you free.

This proliferation of thought, one teacher said, actually eclipses the direct seeing of what is really true. Rather than illuminating reality, we think that we're somehow illuminating reality with all these brilliant thoughts that are proliferating. But the Buddha said that's actually getting in the way of really seeing what's true and what's here. Insights arise when we drop all that and just let the insights naturally arise.

It's easier said than done. This is why they call it practice, and we have to keep coming back to the cushion, coming back to the breath. To me, the real gold of the practice is this ability to drop all this proliferating mind and to really just arrive fully here in this present moment. [Laughter] Appreciate just what's happening at the sense doors, and see thinking for what it really is, which is just these little thoughts that bubble up and really don't amount to much.

I think I'll stop there. Thanks for listening, and we'll open it up if anybody has any questions. I'm happy to try to clarify anything that wasn't clear or if anybody wants to share anything. It's nice to build sangha^[12] here from each other.

Q&A

Questioner: I'll ask a question. You quoted, I think it was Gary Snyder, saying something about the emptiness of thought. What is that?

Walt Opie: I love Gary Snyder, but I didn't quote him tonight. That's—

Questioner: Jack Kornfield, maybe?

Walt Opie: Joseph Goldstein. Probably Joseph Goldstein.

Questioner: I think I know what you mean now, though.

Walt Opie: What he said was, "For the purpose of meditation, nothing is particularly worth thinking about," which is just a little bit of a humorous way to point to this idea that just sitting here thinking is not really what meditation is all about. Were you trying to point to something else?

Questioner: Yeah, I thought there was a different quote referring to thought being empty.

Walt Opie: Oh, maybe I did quote Guy Armstrong as well. Let's see. I have to find Guy Armstrong. He said, "Other perceptions and thoughts now beset us quite apart from our wishes or intentions." Yeah, I'm not sure which quote you're talking about, sorry.

Questioner: Thank you for your teaching. I've had a conversation just this week, and I'm reading Mingyur Rinpoche's^[13] book The Joy of Living, and he talked about emptiness, which to me is kind of mindboggling as Buddhism tries to explain that. With the idea of thoughts, I've always tried to tolerate my own busy mind when I'm meditating because it's just going. I think of it as constantly generating, just busy all the time. Meditating allows it to slow down. But then there's a sense of this conversation about where a thought begins and ends. Sometimes I just let it go and I'm in my thoughts, other times I'm paying attention to how they emerge and how they pass, like watching the clouds go by. I was just talking to my sister about this this week, that emptiness is where it all happens. The thoughts are just going around, and the emptiness is more like the sky where the thoughts are the clouds. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that?

Walt Opie: Sure, I'll try. My understanding of emptiness is that a lot of it is empty of something, right? Empty of self—that's a big part of it. When we finally drop all that proliferating thought, it is selfing in a certain way. Usually, it's a "me": "They did this to me," "I should have done that," "I'm going to do that," "I did this in the past." It's a lot of me-ing. Everything comes out of emptiness because it's not us. When we can drop all that, and when I was pointing to being fully present, you could say that's in emptiness, because the idea is you've dropped the self and you're just here with what is. You're not really thinking about this person here. [Laughter] There's a way in which we can drop that.

There's a guy, Dr. Judson Brewer, who studied long-term meditators to see what was going on in their brains while they were meditating in certain states. I'm not a neuroscientist, but when we're proliferating thoughts, we're up here in the red zone. Then there's a line in the middle, and below the line is where we stop all this proliferation of thought, and it goes into a blue zone. The long-term meditators might start with some red, but the red quickly dies down, and then their brain waves are all down here in the blue, and there's no selfing going on. All the cursory thought isn't there. I think that's a helpful image. When we're meditating, in my view, we're trying to let that red area die down so that we can enjoy the bliss of the blue. There's a real sense of peace, calm, and ease in the blue zone. You could call that the empty zone because it's the empty-of-self zone. That's the best way I can speak to what you were mentioning. Does that help?

Questioner: Okay, thank you.

[Laughter]

Questioner: So, is a really helpful, profound insight a thought?

Walt Opie: It does manifest as a thought. And that's the tricky part about this. It's not to say all thoughts are bad, but we are trying to point to the nature of thought. We've talked about where thoughts come from: we have sense contact, we have a feeling tone about that (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral), and then we name it, "What was that that just happened?" Then the thoughts start bubbling up related to that because it's what's happening now, and it's rather involuntary. But when we have an insight, we understand it as a thought, as words in some way, but I think it comes from a place beyond thought. I know this is all hard to talk about. It might just be understanding the true impermanent nature of all conditioned phenomena, right? We can all say that and we kind of understand it, but there's a way where it becomes an insight where we really get it all of a sudden. That's different than just thinking about it. So it is tricky. It's not just a thought; it's beyond thinking. [Laughter] To quote a Zen phrase, yeah. Thank you for the question, it's a good one.

Questioner: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the distinction between thought and emotion. Sometimes when we're meditating, or even when we're not, we'll have these really strong emotions that overpower our ability to sort of think our way through. They're just really there and overwhelming. Sometimes I feel a lot of the teachings speak about thought as this calm, rational, busy mind, when emotions are driving a lot of our mental states.

Walt Opie: Yeah, I don't know why emotions feel harder to talk about than thoughts, but I think that's part of the problem here. Thoughts and emotions are intertwined; they kind of come with each other. Venerable Anālayo^[14], one of my teachers, talks about how the feeling tone is a bridge between the body and the mind. It's helpful when we have a strong emotion to look back at what happened that triggered that. It's usually related to a thought that arose based on a feeling tone.

I find that emotion has less and less power over me as I learn to work with thoughts in the way that I've been talking about. I can't really explain why yet. [Laughter] I've got to think about this more! It's a wonderful question. I don't think I have a great response. Emotions are complex, and I think it's very similar how we want to work with them: we don't want to give them too much power over us. I don't try to deny them at all. I try to feel them, be mindful of what's arising, but they just don't have the same power over me that they once did.

It depends on what emotions we're talking about, because there's anger, sadness... Part of it is just being mindful of what emotions are present, and like thoughts, that helps them not have so much power over us. If we can investigate what's bringing this emotion up at this time, when I can start to see that, it starts to have less and less power.

Emotions don't always make that much sense. I remember my father was going through a period of dying of leukemia. I went to visit him, and at some point I had to go back to my job. I got on an airplane and was reading a magazine, and something struck my funny bone. I started laughing on this airplane and I couldn't stop. I was laughing till I was crying, and I'm sure people thought I needed to be checked into an asylum because I was just losing it. I know it was related to my grief. I thought it might have been the last time I was going to see him alive. I just remember it was so fraught. Emotions can really take over. A lot of the teachings I've heard around this suggest we just want to see this stuff as early as we can, when it's first starting to percolate, rather than when we're in a full-blown storm of whatever emotion. That becomes the way we learn to work with it better.

Questioner: That's helpful, thank you.

Walt Opie: Sure, thank you for the question.

Questioner: I just want you to know how significant this topic is and the incredible impact that thinking has on us. Primarily, I actually did hear you respond to the question when I heard you say that the emotion comes many times out of the feeling tone. In many ways in my studies, I have become really clear on the exploration of thinking—how a thought has incredible power on how I feel and how I see the world. So, is the thinking generating a lot of the feelings? Even at times when I thought I wasn't thinking anything, why am I feeling this way so pervasively? There are special ways of going about it, like writing and exploring: "If I were to guess what it is that I was thinking, what would it be?" What happens is that sometimes it's just underneath the conscious mind, and that information is available. One of my favorite psychiatrists talks about how to draw a stick figure: "When I'm not thinking anything, why am I feeling this way? What would the stick figure be thinking about this specifically that I'm perplexed about?" Then a plethora of thoughts come. I just want you to know this is a very important topic. If there was very good attendance to it, reality could be otherwise. Had I not been awake, I would have missed it.

Walt Opie: Thank you. Beautiful. What a perfect note to end on. Thank you very much. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks for your presence, and I enjoyed being here.