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Web of Thoughts

Good evening. I take it you are not football fans, or basketball fans, or I shouldn't have asked. I guess there are a lot of people normally here who watch basketball championship games. This is nice; I like it when there's a smaller group. It gives us a different opportunity.

What I'd like to do is speak a little bit about thinking in a particular way, and then have some time for discussion about these ideas. To do this, I'd like to begin with something that maybe is trying to be a poem:

Like spiders we spin threads of silk. Like spiders we weave elaborate webs. Unlike spiders, we get caught in the webs we make. Thoughts are our fine silk threads. Thinking is what weaves our webs. The stickiest webs are plans and plots, fears and frets^[1], "me versus you," "me wants you." Fastening thoughts to our webs is how we get caught, and how we become both predator and prey for ourself. Each thread of thought is thin and weak, dissolving as it appears. Ten thousand thoughts wrapped around each other make steel chains, chains knotted together, impossible to untie, here to stay. But let the next thin, weightless, insubstantial thought fly by, like you would allow a bird to fly through the sky. This is the painless, bloodless sword that cuts your Gordian knot.

Being mindful of thinking is a very useful part of meditation practice, or Buddhist practice. Beginning to observe thoughts and have a different relationship to them is central to the path to Buddhist freedom. Buddhism has a lot to do with our relationship with thinking: how we relate to thoughts, how we get involved in them, the webs we spin, the ideas and concepts we create, and the worlds of our thinking that we then inhabit. It has a lot to do with how we get caught and imprisoned in prisons of thoughts, ideas, and concepts.

To begin to get a different relationship to thinking—to not invest in thinking as being the only thing that's worth it, or what solves all the issues of our life—is to be able to recognize that there can also be places of silence in the mind. This can create a wonderful spaciousness around our thoughts, instead of our thinking being claustrophobic in the tight little space of the knots we create and spin.

I like the idea that individual thoughts by themselves are like fine silk threads. I've never felt a spiderweb thread carefully, but they call it silk, so I imagine it's smooth and sticky. Spiders have glands on their stomach where they exude silk and spin out these threads. It's almost like we have little glands in our brains and their jobs are to exude thoughts. It's just what the brain does. Individual thoughts are just fine, very thin silk threads—no problem.

One of the really fascinating things to become aware of is if you're not immersed in thoughts and the world of the web. If you're able to step back enough and have enough stillness, calm, or mindfulness to watch thoughts appear effortlessly and unbidden. There was no planning of them, no design for them to appear. It wasn't like you set yourself up to think about something. You're just minding your own business and suddenly a door opens up and your mind has a thought: "Well, that's a door. I wonder if I left my door at home open."

That thought just passes through effortlessly. But then you might get involved: "Well, if I left the door open, it's really hot. The neighborhood raccoons might come in. They're clever, they'd probably find their way to the refrigerator. Not only will the kitchen be a mess, but they might rip up the inside of the refrigerator trying to get that wonderful chocolate cake I have in the back. That's going to be a lot of work to clean up, and I'm going to have to get a new refrigerator. That's going to cost a lot of money, and I don't have a lot of money. I better figure out how to make more money. Maybe I should get a new job."

So we start spinning a web of this imaginary world of the door being open and what that means. Then we're involved, stuck in it, tied up in what we're going to do. You spend the whole meditation session just solving your work problems and finding a better job. At the end of meditation, you're going on Craigslist looking for work. You go home, find out the door is closed, and you think, "What was I doing? That was a whole trip I took."

I once took a trip like that. It wasn't continuous, but I think it was probably about seven months that I was spinning this web and caught up in it. It had to do with being the head cook at the monastery. I'd spent a year working in the monastery kitchen, and I was probably, at that point, the most skilled cook in the whole monastery. I was poised to be the next head cook the following season for the guests. It was a wonderful job, and I thought, of course, they're going to choose me when the guest season starts in April.

I spent the winter, every time there was a meal, thinking about recipes, menus, and planning ahead. When you have meals in the monastery, you are in your meditation posture so you can meditate around the meal. You finish eating and wait for the food to be taken away, but I didn't meditate. I was thinking thoughts about the wonderful next season when I was going to be the cook.

This went on until it was time for the announcements. They had a formal, almost ritual way of doing it. Everyone was in the meditation hall standing there, and someone read out the names and assignments. Lo and behold, I was not assigned to the kitchen. When I didn't hear my name, I was placed somewhere else. I thought, "What was I doing all those months? What a waste of time!" It was a powerful lesson because I looked back—wow, every meal I was caught in that web and repeating it. I could have been doing something useful with my time. I could have been meditating.

To watch how the first thought sometimes comes effortlessly, how it just appears—if you're able to see a thought arise by itself, and you don't get involved, pick it up, or add to it, you just watch it—then it has the nature of dissolving quickly. There can be a feeling of freedom in relationship to it. There can even be a sense of, "Oh wow, this mind just does something."

When I was in the same monastery, for a while I was kind of like the altar boy. I was the person who was ringing all these bells during the chanting. They organized a special ceremony because they had visiting Japanese Zen master dignitaries coming to the monastery, and they wanted to show them the Western students chanting and ringing bells. I was supposed to ring the bells for the ceremony. There was a particular sequence in which the chanting is done, and no one told me that the sequence had been changed. Suddenly they started chanting, and I wasn't ready with the bells, gongs, and drums because I was taken by surprise. I was ready for something else, so I was slower to start. Eventually, I started up.

Later, the abbot came and talked to me about it because it was his place, and he was showing off to his visiting priests. I explained to him, and all I got out of my mouth was, "Well, I wasn't thinking that you were going to..." And he said, "Don't think!" I was a little bit perplexed by that. But I think his idea was that if I hadn't been thinking, I would have spontaneously joined along, or I would have picked up the change and just done it effortlessly.

I see that often in my mind: there's a lot of wisdom, understanding, and wonderful things that can happen in that part of the mind where thoughts arise effortlessly. There they are, they just happened. To go around the day trusting that mind—it's a quieter mind than many active, discursive minds, but it's still an intelligent mind. Your intelligence is still there, you remember things, you can figure out what to do. It tends to be a mind that's very much in the present moment. Because if you watch just to let the thought arise and then dissolve, you're left here. Whereas if you're caught in a web of thoughts about the past or the future, you're in that world.

You can see how so much of our life, in some conventional way, can be taken care of in this place where thoughts arise effortlessly. You can experiment with this. I was putting the dishes in the dishwashing machine this evening, and there were simple thoughts: "Oh, if you put it there on that side of the rack, you can fit more. Then you can put those over there." Very simple, innocent thoughts. I wasn't actively thinking them in terms of planning. If my family was watching and I was trying to show them that I'm the best dishwasher loader in the world, then I would be really involved and caught in a web. But no one was in the kitchen, so there was no showing off. It was just doing something regular.

I could watch these very simple thoughts. Some thoughts were so distant and quiet. If I was involved in other thoughts, I wouldn't have recognized that I was thinking. I would say I was on automatic pilot. But because I was somewhat quiet, I could see this very subtle thought just arise and pass. I wasn't "doing" them, but they were useful. They helped me line up the plates in a more efficient way.

What I'm trying to say is that there is a functioning of the mind that can happen that doesn't require your self-conscious involvement in thinking. If we're caught in the web of thoughts that we create, chances are very high that we're self-consciously involved. We have desires and aversions. We want something, we're trying to get away from something, we're trying to make something happen. A major player in all those concerns is "me, myself, and mine."^[2] It gets really sticky, and that stickiness makes it sometimes very hard to pull ourselves away from thinking.

It's possible, with a quiet, mindful mind, to feel the stickiness, the gravitational pull into thoughts, or the drive and energy to be in thoughts. You see it as meditators: you let go of your thoughts to go back to your breathing, and the next thing you know, you're back in your thoughts. You try again, and after a while, you can feel the energy of being pulled into it. Or you put a lot of effort into trying to stay on the breath, and you can feel the attraction or the allure of the mind saying, "This is really important, you have to think this." You can feel that tug, the stickiness and the glue.

For people who haven't done some kind of meditation or really studied their mind carefully, it can be very compelling to think, because that's all we have. It's the only tool we have to figure things out, solve problems, get ahead, get pleasure, or distract ourselves from our difficulties. We think for all kinds of reasons, and we have the idea that this purpose is really important. The promise of thoughts: "If I think it through..." I bet a fair number of you have ruminated around the same concern over and over again, and you only do it because some part of you believes that somehow, if you do it right, you'll get a solution.

Some of these webs of thoughts that we get caught in are labyrinths, or more like mazes. We go into the maze and it's very hard to find our way out, especially if we're trying to think our way out, because we're still in the maze if we're thinking. Sometimes it can feel impossible to get out by ourselves, and that's why some people will do dramatic things to distract themselves. Their thinking mind is so painful and incessant that people will use alcohol and drugs to break the cycle. Some people will do recreational things—sex, exercise, watching movies—just to get out of their own mind because it's so difficult.

In the path of mindfulness, we're learning to look at that directly and learn to relax the mind, relax the tension, relax that pull or drive, that investment we make in the world of thoughts. We can have a very different relationship with thinking, not have it be so sticky, and not be so pulled into the webs we spin. When all these thoughts go fast and furious and come together, having been building for years, they feel like solid steel chains tying themselves in knots. People think it's impossible to break them; they don't even know how they got into them.

So the poem has this very simple way: the sword that cuts the Gordian knot, the painless, bloodless sword. That is discovering how to see thoughts arise effortlessly and not get involved. Just like you watch a bird go through the sky. You allow it to go through the sky. You don't stop it, hold onto it, or throw sticky glue on it. They just go through the sky of the mind, the sky of awareness. There's no effort for you. Let thoughts go through the sky of the mind and just fly away and disappear. Don't be involved, don't pick them up, don't add thoughts to them, just watch them. To watch those effortless thoughts appear, glide through, and dissolve—that cuts the knot.

That puts you apart from this whole complex web and the knots that thinking creates. I really trust that mind that is able to watch thoughts arise effortlessly. It's the mind, the awareness, that can watch that happen. That's where freedom begins to be found. It's not very dramatic, it doesn't seem very promising, and it might seem out of scale with the tremendous importance of these webs of thoughts. It's very humble, very simple, very soft. Just the mind that's able to watch the mind. It's like the sky that the bird goes through. A thought arises and it dissolves. Trust that awareness.

If you can go through your days trusting that awareness, you might be able to discover the joy, the amusement, and the wisdom of watching all these effortless thoughts arise that take care of you and help you find your way. There might be some times we have to intentionally think and get engaged. It's not a crime to think. But to have this effortless quality support you, guide you, and be a source of understanding... you realize, "Wow, there's something else operating here that's supporting me that is not 'me'." It's still coming out of you, but it's not the "you" that has created this ensnaring web.

Perhaps the self that Buddhism is talking about unwinding and dissolving is just a complicated spider web that we've spun for ourselves. To pull out the threads and let it all unravel is freedom.

Group Discussion

To be able to really see and track thoughts is a foreign thing for some people if they haven't learned it. But that's something that comes over time as you do mindfulness practice and keep meditating. You start seeing there's actually a radically different way of living that, for some people, is a revolution in their minds and life. It's not rooted or centered in thinking. You can still think, but it's centered more in this awareness that can see the arising and dissolving of thoughts, making room for this effortless place of thinking to occur.

One of the advantages of this is that if we're caught up in the web of thinking, there's not a lot of room for other forms of thoughts to arise. If you have quiet in the mind and can track effortless thoughts, you'll be surprised what arises, what shows itself, and what informs you. It's actually a richer, bigger world to live in. We spin the webs that we ourselves get caught in. To step back and watch the next thought arise effortlessly is how we dissolve the web.

Do you have any history with thinking where you recognized for yourself, "Yes, that time twenty years ago, or last week, or this afternoon, I spun a web of thoughts and ideas, and I was caught in it, trapped in it, and couldn't pull myself out?" What was that like, and how did you get out? And do you have any experience of what I'm talking about—having an effortless thought arise that was clearly your mind, but a quieter voice, and it just came and went?

What I'd like to ask you to do is to form little groups of three or four people. You don't have to share anything that's too personal, but share if you have any personal experience related to what I'm talking about. We'll take about seven minutes to do this and then we'll come back here.

[Applause]