Just Stop Thinking

Reflection: #51

When I was a kid, I remember asking myself (and my friends), what would happen if I were to stop thinking?  

Why can't I stop thinking?  

I would try to stop thinking, but I couldn't.  

I remember friends flippantly saying, “well, if you stopped thinking, you'd be dead.”  

So, eventually, I gave up and have now spent decades lost hopelessly in thought with no way to stop.  

I had come to assume that a person actually can't stop thinking.

But in the past few years, after taking up meditation seriously, I've changed my mind.  

Not only is it possible to stop thinking, at least thinking in a rational, logical, verbal way, it is necessary to retain one's happiness, if not sanity.  It's so necessary to one’s sanity in fact, that we all do it every night when we enter dreamless sleep. 

A profound early insight that meditation led me to is this:  I am not my thoughts (Related, I am not my emotions).

Sit alone with your thoughts and "watch" them some time.  You will be horrified at the utter lack of logic and direction to most of them.  Random thoughts will pop in your mind.  Many will be judgements that are untrue.  Many will be judgements about yourself that are untrue.  

An unconquered mind whispers a stream of thoughts into your mental “ear” like a devil who sits on your shoulder and tries to drive you insane with lies and half truths.  But it's mostly just frantic noisy distraction.  

And we've built a frantic, noisy, distracting society to cater to our minds.  Most people can't go five minutes without needing to feed more distractions into their mind.  

Zombies walk around staring into their phones, never having an moment of peace.  Never having a moment of calm.  Never having an original thought.  Never glimpsing truth.  Never glimpsing happiness, true happiness.  

We distract ourselves because we are afraid of what our minds might whisper to us.  

But you can make your mind serve you.  It takes stillness.  It takes calm.  It takes training your mind that you aren't listening to its siren songs.  It takes realizing that you are not your thoughts (although, often, what you think is what you get.)

If you stop thinking, you will experience, for the first time, true, blessed, silence.  I’ve heard it said that what we actually, deeply.  want is not peace of mind, but peace from mind.

I've done it on occasion - stopped thinking that is.  I do it almost daily at this point.  And, not only am I still alive, but  the times when I'm not controlled by my thoughts are the times when I am most alive.  Let’s call them near life experiences.

Thinking or living?  Thinking or living?  In any moment, choose one.  

We've all done this, actually.  We’ve all stopped thinking and just lived and experienced beautiful, spiritual moments.  Hopefully you've at least had great sex at some point and have completely “lost yourself” in the ecstasy of the moment.  At that moment, you weren't thinking, you were living.  

Now imagine bringing some of that ecstasy to most moments.  I don't know if that’s possible, but I intend to pursue it. Because what I’ve discovered is that once you master the mind enough, it becomes your assistant instead of your master.  And then your thinking can be directed in a way that is intentional and profound as you focus the formidable power of human attention in a way that pulls life to you instead of pushing it away. 

And, so, I’ve finally answered my childhood question, "what will happen if I stop thinking?"  

The answer is life.

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