Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Inner Work


For the week of February 3, 2014

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Who Is Thinking?

(Mind and Thought: Part 2)

Sometimes I think, but mostly it thinks. “It” in this case refers to the automatic mind, the mental machinery that churns out thoughts based on reacting to sensory impressions of the moment, bouncing off accidently triggered memories of the past, responding to unconscious concerns and drives, or chaining off other automatic, self-generated thoughts. These automatic thoughts think themselves and dominate our mind, both in being the most prevalent type of thinking and in being the most influential, in a pre-conscious way. They acquire their influence from the simple fact that we claim them, or rather they claim us. They pretend to represent our views, to be our very own inner voice. And we accept that at face value.

This ongoing stream of automatic thinking is so prevalent, so ordinary, and we are so accustomed to it, that we just believe all these thoughts are ours, are the voice of our soul, and are truly coming from our core self. This despite the fact that a little direct and unbiased inward observation clearly shows that nearly all our thoughts are thinking themselves. The thought stream goes on and on, without any intentional thinking on our part, without the need for our participation. It never stops its inner talking, to us as passive spectators and believers.

One of the major functions of our mind is to make sense of our life and our world. So our thoughts form around the events, people, things, goals, difficulties and all the rest in our life. These attempts at sense-making include many automatic thinking processes such as putting what happens, putting the stuff of our life into the story of our life, into our ongoing narrative and commentary on our life. This occurs by itself, with little or no intention on our part. But it seems important, it seems to be about us personally, and it seems to be us, our I, that is doing it. While this sense-making is important and useful, and is often about us, it is mostly just the complex mechanism of our brain doing its own wonderful thing, without our I being the one who is doing it. It happens almost entirely automatically. At times, though, we do intentionally think about some aspect of our life. Then I am the one who is thinking. But usually our brain is thinking for us, automatically. And it draws us into this orbit of automatic story-telling, narrating, and commenting, which all together form an image that we take to be ourselves. This is our self-making mind.

Another reason the automatic nature of our thoughts is so difficult for us to see is that the times we do think intentionally leave us with the impression that all our thoughts are intentional. Yes, we can and do drive our thoughts. We plan, we solve problems, we consider issues and much more, by intentionally thinking. In these cases we have a very different relationship with our thoughts. We are not just passive in front of them. We get their meaning, we evaluate them, and choose further directions for them. The quality of energy is different than the automatic energy that fuels our associative thinking. With intentional thinking, we use and direct the sensitive energy as the very stuff of our thoughts. We do the thinking. Our I thinks. No longer is it thinking.

But that does not last. At some point, usually unnoticeable and unremarked by us, we slip out of sensitive thinking and back into automatic thought. There is no readily discernable boundary between the two states. So while we still believe that we are thinking, as was the case a moment earlier, now it is thinking, not us. And off we go.

Another mode of sensitive thinking runs parallel to automatic thought, wherein we are in contact with the meaning of our thoughts, including those in the automatic stream. We see and recognize our thoughts as they go by, without intentionally changing them. We pursue this in the practice of presence, awareness of the whole, including the contents of our mind. We practice this in meditation. If we are particularly settled in our meditation, we might see one of the underlying layers of our thought-mind, a layer of free-floating snippets of thought, unconnected, not forming complete sentences, sometimes not even forming complete concepts, a kind of thought soup. No one is thinking those snippets; they are just the raw material from which thoughts form. Then some of these snippets coalesce into a whole thought and join the great ongoing stream of thought.

For this week look at your thoughts as they stream by. Ask yourself who is thinking these thoughts? Am I thinking these thoughts, or are they thinking themselves? Who does this thought think it is? Who do I think this thought is?


     

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