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Mindfulness, Thinking, Mindlessness, Rumination

Welcome. It's good to be with you.

I saw a cartoon of two people sitting in chairs on a beach, looking out on the water. One person says to the other, "I'm relaxed enough that I've stopped thinking about the drive here, but not so relaxed that I'm not thinking about the drive back." [Laughter]

The topic for this morning is thinking, mindlessness, mindfulness, and rumination. I want to try to parse different forms of non-mindfulness. Maybe not all forms of non-mindfulness are created equal.

The patterns of thinking do change, I think, quite dramatically over the course of a practice life. We come to contemplate the Dharma, to think about the Dharma a lot. In a sense, more and more reminds us of the Dharma, and so this becomes an active point of reflection and contemplation.

There are other changes. There are real reductions in certain species of self-related thinking. It's not that all thoughts of self-reference drop out of consciousness entirely—maybe not for me—but certain kinds of self-referential, ruminative thoughts of who we are, what we're like, where we're going, what people think, what the future looks like for me, who I will become, or what I will acquire, fade quite a bit. This movement of taking the self as an object and pondering it is a very congealed mode of thinking, and I think that fades. But not all non-mindfulness is the same. Not all thinking is the same. Not all forms of autopilot are equally destructive.

We meditators tend to be a little embarrassed that we think. When the guided meditation kicks in, and we're in the middle of some wild something, or we're wondering what that persistent knocking is at the wrong door—that moment of being called back to the breathing is jarring. There is a sense of almost like a child being caught doing something wrong.

And, of course, thinking is not the enemy. The mind is just another sense gate, like hearing or feeling. I remember a teacher saying you would never try to plug your ears with cotton in order to get enlightened, but we have those same fantasies—whatever the equivalent of plugging the ears with cotton would be—for our thinking. I remember during a retreat, Michelle McDonald^[1] said, "If you broadcast what everyone was thinking in the hall, it would break your heart."

We are learning about thinking and about silence. If we're ashamed of anything inside us, it short-circuits investigation. If it feels like we may discover something about ourselves, about our conditioning, that could break us, we don't look.

A brain researcher named Kalina Christoff^[2] does a lot of very interesting work and is interested in mindfulness meditation. In one research approach, she had participants do a "think aloud" paradigm. For ten minutes in a room, they were asked to speak out the papañca^[3] in their minds—the mental proliferation. "Just say it out loud, don't censor yourself, ten minutes, just go."

Research assistants transcribed and coded the speech, deciphering it into different categories and chunks. Christoff gave one example line: "Hopefully I'll get the new job because I really want it. I'm tired of my old job. I miss my dog. I haven't seen her in a long time." So it was just that for ten minutes. You have to lift a glass to the research assistants there too; that job is no joke. [Laughter]

They gathered all of this data to parse what is happening in people's minds. On average, there were 1,300 words and 30 discrete chunks of thought, including 20 major transitions. That example of "I'm tired of my old job, I miss my dog"—that's a major transition. Twenty of those occurred in the course of ten minutes. She was also looking at the valence—the vedanā^[4]—whether the thoughts were positive, negative, or neutral, as well as the continuities and discontinuities.

Seeing that data—1,300 words, 30 discrete chunks of thought, 20 breaks in continuity, all in ten minutes—and recognizing that we live in that, raises a question: Why has evolution conserved those habits so exquisitely? Is it just to humiliate us as meditators? It feels like that sometimes. But it is probably useful for staying alive. We heard a door knocking, and there was some sense of vigilance or a question of "What is that?" We did not stay with our breath. You did not keep listening to me. All of a sudden, there was something else.

Single-pointedness has a certain kind of defenselessness about it. To just sit and to relinquish vigilance, orientation, and the tracking of threats and opportunities entails some measure of trust and safety. This is part of why we take the precepts on retreat—to know that we have each other's backs, to know that we are formally committed to non-harming, so that some of the vigilance might be released. This allows us to settle into the moment in a deeper way.

The habits of fragmentation, discontinuity, and narrating our lives have evolutionary value, I am sure. But our happiness was not at the top of evolution's to-do list. This is why some of this path goes against the stream.

Sometimes it's said that mindfulness is the only factor you can't get enough of. You can overdo anything else: you can overdo effort, energy, compassion, or equanimity, and that can put you out of balance. But one of the classical views is that there's no such thing as too much mindfulness; it can never actually put us out of balance. I was reflecting on this and thought, "Yes, I agree." If we're aspiring for awakening in every moment, mindfulness is vital. When we are really practicing, we can sense that even a short burst of unconsciousness carries a certain kind of hangover.

In the context of a deep aspiration for enlightenment, you're kindling a fire, and moments of unconsciousness douse the glowing embers. You can actually start to feel it. Unconsciousness diffuses the energy of insight and samādhi^[5]. That is true when we're dedicating each moment to freedom. But if we're honest, at best, we're aspiring for enlightenment some of the time. Not all the time. The rest of the time, I'd just like to be comfortable. [Laughter]

Nuances of Mindlessness

So, I want to put in a plug for mindlessness. This is not a retreat talk, by the way. Some talks you could give on a Sunday morning or on a retreat; this one you do not give on a retreat. This is different. This is about how we can be nuanced about mindlessness. This portion of the talk is sponsored by Netflix, just in the interest of full disclosure. [Laughter]

When attention is engaged consistently, it requires effort and energy. There are times when we develop so much momentum that, to use the image Gil^[6] uses, mindfulness is like coasting down the water with the wind and current at your back. But a lot of times, attending to the breathing entails a measure of attentional energy, and that has fatiguing effects.

Part of why we practice moments of mindfulness is to elevate the trait level of mindfulness—the dispositional level of mindfulness that we're at when we're not trying to be mindful. That changes over time. It makes it such that we don't actually have to marshal all this energy asking, "Can I be mindful? Can I remember?" The cruising altitude of our awareness becomes clearer. But that's a whole process, and I don't think it ever really stops.

In the meantime, it takes energy to devote attention to the breathing, to a book, to a person, or to work. There can be a kind of backlash, depletion, or fatigue. Sometimes you see it on retreat: you're exerting a lot of energy, and then you just hit a wall. For those who have done residential retreats, you may be familiar with how the energy just sags. It gets chaotic and very difficult to focus or to feel connected to the path of practice. The energy flags.

In our lives, we may have been through something intense. It might be a significant life event, something in the larger culture like COVID, or just a long day of work or caring for a child or a parent. There's a sense that the attention has flagged and needs to go slack. We see this again after a retreat. Sometimes people have a really rich retreat, get home, and experience a backlash of unconsciousness where the attention needs to go fully slack.

We seek something that is utterly undemanding, attentionally speaking. We seek the path of least resistance—the activity with zero attentional caloric burn. Running burns a thousand calories an hour, but we're looking for what equates to zero calories burned for our attention.

It's worth examining our own patterns around this. What are our low-calorie attention habits? How do we try to soothe ourselves? What are the rhythms of exertion and going slack? Sometimes we might say, "I'm just feeling lazy," but other times it feels like there's something needed to restore attentional balance. I was almost going to use the word "wholesome," though maybe that's too much, but there is a genuine need to go slack attentionally to burn zero attention calories. Sleep is part of this, and zoning out in different ways is definitely part of fulfilling that thirst.

Our days are punctuated by this rhythm of giving attention and conserving it, of giving it and rebuilding it. It's like interval training in exercise: you run really fast for a bit, then walk slowly, then run fast again. It's worth investigating how our internal attention economy functions. Some of our work is examining what those intervals should be.

We also need to be careful about what we're consuming on our attentional breaks because we're pretty porous and defenseless in that time. Thich Nhat Hanh's^[7] vision of the precept regarding not taking intoxicants includes entertainment, because it gets in deeply. We want to be sensitive to when we've had our fill. Sometimes attention goes slack and a wholesome restoration process happens, but then we keep going. There's a momentum of unconsciousness, and we keep going even when our attention has been replenished. We continue in this zero-attentional-caloric-burn mode, and you can start to feel that it feels different from the restoration mode.

Summing up where we are so far: you don't need to engage your attention all the time, but be careful with your doses of mindlessness, what you consume, and the intervals between engaging and releasing attention.

The Collapse of Knowing and Rumination

So far, I've been trying to dignify certain forms of non-mindfulness. But other species of non-mindfulness are more corrosive and problematic, where we are actively marinating in the defilements—the forces of greed, hate, and delusion. The traditional view might say that any mindlessness is marinating in the defilements, but I want to illuminate a distinction that feels real to me: there are species of being lost that are much more problematic than just letting the attention go slack.

The wellspring of suffering is greed, hate (or aversion), and delusion. We're very familiar with what greed looks like, and with what aversion or hate looks like. Delusion is more slippery. Sometimes delusion itself is defined simply as being lost in thought.

When mindfulness collapses, we truly are on a train ride, and we never get to decide where we're going. Our habits, good and bad, make that call. They're the conductor. The movement from attending to the breathing to being identified with thought is itself thoroughly encased in unconsciousness. It's not like we decide, "Okay, now maybe I'll get lost in some thoughts of dragons." There's just a collapse, and we move off the breathing and into some thought realm. We then live in that bubble and are severed from the Dharma. A very precipitous collapse happens. The nature of mindlessness is perfect identification with the content of thought. It's an utter collapse of knowing.

As the philosopher Thomas Metzinger^[8] describes it, the beginning of every mind-wandering episode is marked exactly by the collapse of our "epistemic agent model." I'll unpack this; Metzinger always talks like this. He says the beginning of every mind-wandering episode is marked by the collapse of our epistemic agent model—a conscious representation of possessing the ability for epistemic self-control, for knowing. And the end of every episode of mind-wandering is marked by the re-emergence of a new epistemic agent model: the meta-aware self. That is the self that is aware, the meditator that can know, "I was lost in thought, now I am here." He goes on to say, "I think it could be fruitful to analyze mind-wandering as a loss of mental autonomy."

When we are not identified with thought, we have an implicit model of ourselves in which we can direct our attention. We can direct our thinking to the breathing, to the body more broadly, to feeling tone, or to the mind. We have a sense of a model where we can exercise attentional control. When we get lost, the epistemic agent—something capable of knowing—collapses very precipitously. In a sense, no one is there to notice. That model collapses, and we become perfectly identified with the thought. We literally become the protagonist of the thought world, and we forget it's just a character.

We truly lose our sense of mental autonomy, and wherever that train is going, that's where we're headed. We may be headed to heaven or hell, but we are not conducting. In those moments, the Dharma feels remote. The default assumptions of that mode of living, of being identified with thought, are not full of Dharma.

The moment of coming back is the re-emergence of meta-awareness—some kind of mindfulness. That re-emergence is a moment of mindfulness, as every teacher says. Once again, we are aware of phenomena as phenomena. We're aware of the body as phenomena, the breath as phenomena. Everything is phenomena again. But that was deeply forgotten in the collapse of the epistemic agent.

One species of this collapse that deserves note is rumination. This brings us back to Kalina Christoff. Rumination, brooding—this obsessional, abstract, deeply lost mode of thinking—is not good for us. Christoff writes, "Instead of freely moving from one topic to another, individuals prone to rumination exhibited longer negative thoughts, and negative content in ruminative individuals was linked to a narrowing in conceptual scope over time, suggested by higher levels of semantic similarity." In ruminative modes, there is this narrowing. We can feel it when we get into those modes; it literally feels claustrophobic. The mind feels narrow. We're perseverating about something, we're chewing on something, and the words and thoughts share a high degree of semantic similarity.

This is a very congealed sense of self. In the dream of rumination, we have almost completely forgotten the three characteristics: dukkha, anicca, and anattā^[9]—suffering, unreliability, and not-self. In our ruminations, in that state of deep loss, we fantasize about a durable pleasure that might structure our lives. We fervently hope to tie up all the loose ends of being human and hold the world still. We try to game out uncertainty and find the path through the labyrinth of anicca, of unreliability. And we fantasize about taking refuge in an identity, of finally finding our home in some sense of "This is me. This is self."

All of those are different kinds of dead ends. But we're so earnest in our rumination, in being lost. With rumination, we're often trying to solve an affective, emotional problem with thoughts. We trust thinking; it's the main tool in our problem-solving arsenal, and we over-trust it.

The word ruminate itself means chewing. It's like we're trying to digest our problem with our thoughts, going to chew until we feel better, but we usually wind up feeling worse. Thoughts do not function well as digestive enzymes. Maybe certain kinds of speech with one another can function that way, but when we're deep in our own heads in this ruminative mode, things are not being digested. It's quicksand, and to enter that realm is to lose.

Conclusion

The invitation is to go to the body, to go to the engine of feeling. Clinging necessitates thinking. I don't know that all thinking is a function of clinging, but a lot is. When we find ourselves clinging, thinking becomes vital; we feel compelled to think our way to the object of our clinging.

Instead of taking that approach, we go to the body, to the engine of feeling, where thoughts come off like exhaust. We go to the body and are willing to feel badly. Equanimity with unpleasantness doesn't necessarily feel good. There is a subtle taste of relief in it, but at least initially, it does not feel good. We cannot solve emotional challenges with thought itself, so we go to the body.

We practice patience and equanimity, and begin to release some of the energy of clinging. This begins to take some of the thorns out of our thinking and our rumination. This reconnects us to the Dharma, to what we know, to our own wisdom, to our goodness, to the path, and to the Buddha.

I offer this for consideration. We should sit for a moment together.

Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you this morning. Please pick up what is useful, and leave all the rest behind. I will hang around for a bit if you want to chat. Thank you all.