On the count of three, I want you to stop thinking. Completely. No internal monologue, no daydreaming, no imagining what I look like naked, nothing.
3, 2, 1, Go…
So, did your mind wander? Did you manage not to picture me naked? Did you manage not to think anything at all?
For most people, going more than a few seconds without thinking is extraordinarily difficult. You can probably go longer without breathing. But you might be asking, why would I want to stop thinking? Isn’t that just like sleep? Isn’t that brain death? Well, for basically my entire life I assumed that René Descartes was right when he said, “I think, therefore I am”. I assumed that the words, images, and thoughts running through my head were in fact me. That voice singing “Let It Go” from Frozen over and over and over again — me. That nagging thought that I need to go to the gym more — me. Those fantasies about Tom Daley — me.
But what if that’s not me? I’m not saying it’s someone else. I’m not Professor X. But what if that voice in my head is just like the tip of the me iceberg?
According to Buddhism as I understand it (which is not well), we are not our thoughts. It’s more like we have a special tool in our head. A thinking machine. A computer, if you will. And it can be used like any computer for logic, math, word processing, creativity, entertainment, porn, and much, much more. But it’s still just a tool. One of many tools that we have at our disposal, like a foot, a voice box, sight balls, noise holes, etc. None of which get credit for being “us”. But because we mistake our thinking machine for our “self”, we tend to overuse it. We use it all the time in fact. As if we don’t dare turn it off for fear that if we do, we might not exist anymore. I don’t think, therefore I’m not?
Buddhists have a word for turning their thinking machine off, it’s called “meditation”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Perhaps, like me, you thought meditation was the exact opposite. I always assumed it was the act of over thinking, of deep philosophizing, of searching for insights, of puzzling over whether that guy from Making A Murderer is innocent or not. But no. On the contrary, meditation is the act of not thinking. Or anyway, of trying not to think, and failing hilariously. It’s one of the most difficult tasks imaginable, in part because to be imagining it is to be thinking. You can’t use your thinking machine to understand not thinking. You need to approach it from a different place.
When you learn to meditate, you gradually start to see the processes of your thinking machine in action. You notice that you can notice your thinking, as if from a third person perspective. It’s like there’s someone else inside of you that can see your thinking happening. This other person is what Buddhists would call you, the “real you”. And the “real you” can start to look for small interruptions in the seemingly endless stream chatter going through your mind, little breaks, silences, pockets of emptiness. And the “real you” will discover that within those breaks you still exist, you are still conscious, and you are still you. In this way, it seems that you really are not your thoughts.
I don’t claim to know exactly what this perspective actually is. Is it really the “real you”? Maybe. Is it your spirit or soul? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s another level of consciousness? Or maybe it’s just another part of the brain, like your right brain looking over at your left brain and thinking, don’t you ever shut up? Except it’s not thinking that, because it’s not thinking anything. Which is kind of trippy. Whatever it is, it doesn’t really seem to “think” as such. It’s this quiet perspective inside of us that feels very peaceful, very calm, and very present. This is where the kind of cringe-inducing new-agey buzzword “mindfulness” comes from. It’s this perspective inside of us that doesn’t seem to care about the past or the future. It’s just chilling right here and now in the present moment, kind of like a baby in a high chair with a bottle of brandy. Whatever this perspective is, it’s clearly a profound part of who we are and we don’t take advantage of it nearly enough, if at all. But that’s probably because it’s not easy to achieve.
Getting Discomfortable with Meditation
When I try to turn my thinking machine off, it kind of freaks out. When I meditate, for example, it almost feels as if my brain has Tourette Syndrome. It just keeps spitting out all these totally random snippets of sentences and fragments of imagined conversations, multiplication tables, and naughty limericks. “There once was a man from Regina…” Even if I can silence all of that, my visual cortex begins to act up, like it’s Google’s DeepDream neural net image processor. You know what I’m talking about? That program where you feed an image in and the neural net combines it with all these other similar images, so it’s all like dogs and swirls growing out of people’s faces? No? Well, that’s what happens in my head when I meditate. My brain takes all the colours and dots and squiggles leftover when I close my eyes and turns them into a shifting, hallucinatory jumble of free associations and daydreams. It’s really bizarre.
As you can see, meditation gives you a fascinating perspective on your own mind. But when you actually start to succeed at truly being mindful, when you start to see your thoughts for what they really are, you discover that you can gently brush them away, like Jay-Z dusting off his shoulder. Through meditation, you slowly learn how to do nothing except just sit and exist in the present moment, which it turns out is a pretty fucking great place to be. A study by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard demonstrated that the more our minds wander out of the present moment the less happy we are:
“…a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”
Buddhists would argue, however, that if you practice meditation, you can learn to control your wandering mind and use this “cognitive achievement” to think about what is not happening only when you consciously want to, for the sake of planning, reflecting, fantasizing and/or masturbating. Because wanting anything other than what is happening to us right now at this very moment is what Buddhists call “craving”. They argue that it is this craving itself that actually exacerbates our unhappiness and suffering. So basically they are saying that what you think of as the solution to your problems is actually the cause. What you think of as your goal is actually your problem. My Buddhist bae Pema Chödrön says:
“The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable.”
It seems paradoxical. But let’s say you’re unhappy, or unsatisfied, or suffering in this very moment, and let’s say that you think the way to escape this unhappiness is, hypothetically, to not be reading this post right now. But in fact, it turns out that it is actually the craving to not be reading this post that is making you unhappy in the first place. Because, for better or worse, you are still reading this post. Don’t get me wrong, maybe in the future you should read something else instead. Maybe this just isn’t your cup of tea. But the point is, that’s not going to make you any happier right now. And Buddhists will warn you that there is no happiness in any external thing or moment in time outside of right now.
But here’s the kicker. Even if you decide that you genuinely want to read this post, after all, that isn’t necessarily going to stop you from suffering either. Buddhists claim that life is suffering. And the only way to deal with unavoidable suffering is to accept it fully. Because if you completely accept suffering, then it’s not really suffering anymore, it’s just life. To quote Pema quoting Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, “Life is like getting into a boat that’s just about to sail out to sea and sink.” Yes, that’s an actual quote from P-Chö’s essay entitled, “Hopelessness and Death”.
Getting Discomfortable with Suffering
Now, if you’re anything like me, this is probably the moment when you’re thinking, naaaaah. No thanks Buddhy. Good luck with all the suffering and pain and whatnot, I’m going to go watch the complete Lord of the Rings extended cut trilogy. K thx baiiii.
Admittedly, Buddhism has a bad habit of really laying on the doom and gloom. About halfway through Pema Chödrön’s charmingly titled book, When Things Fall Apart, I was pretty much done with Buddhism forever and, like you perhaps, was about ready to give up on life altogether and just smoke some crystal meth and have unprotected sex with a bunch of strangers in a Korean spa. When suddenly, as if sensing this, Chöchö switched gears and was like, Oh, I almost forgot. The key to Buddhism being even remotely bearable at all is that everything is deeply rooted in compassion, kindness, and humour.
The truth is, Buddhism is not as bad as Buddhists want you to think it is. I think Buddhists really go out of their way to hammer home these points about suffering and pain and a complete lack of all hope, certainty, and security almost as a form of like Buddhist hazing. They want to break you down and make sure you really accept reality before they give you all the good stuff. I think it’s the same reason Buddhists trade in so many riddles, paradoxes, and absurdities. They don’t want to give you anything solid to hold on to, because they don’t believe there is anything solid to hold on to. Buddhism doesn’t want to give you any hope. They don’t want you to have any footing, because they’re just going to push you into the deep end anyway. And when you resurface, gasping for breath, complaining, “Why’d you push me in? I had my phone in my pocket!” They’ll just laugh at you and say, “We didn’t push you in, you were in there all along.”
Which is to say, the solidity we think we have, the safety and dryness of the metaphorical “pool deck” that is life is just an illusion we’ve created to feel safe, dry, and secure. And like all illusions, it is ultimately the source of our problems and pain. You see, in Buddhism, there is no “right” or “wrong” to cling to per se. There are no absolute truths. No tablets with rules carved into them. There isn’t even a bible that anyone really seems to agree on. What kind of religion doesn’t have a bible? The kind that would argue that there is no absolute truth or righteousness to be had in any book, or in life at all for that matter. It is the misguided pursuit of these unattainable goals that in fact causes all of us so much suffering. But, as Pema points out:
“The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong.”
This is when Buddhism started to make sense to me. Yeah, life is suffering. But if you accept that fact with a lot of compassion and kindness, for yourself and everyone else, and if you keep a really great sense of humour about the whole thing, then not only does life become bearable but it’s actually kind of nice. This was the morsel of positive psychology that Buddhism needed to finally match my experience of the world after my so-called “shame breakthrough” (more on that here). After this realization I was like, maybe I should have a chat with Buddhism’s PR team? “Hey guys, love what you’re doing, love your message. But what if we cut out the whole life-is-nothing-but-suffering-and-groundlessness-and-pure-and-utter-hopelessness and instead, maybe focus on like, kindness and puppies and how to get the girl?”
But then I realized that if you skip directly to the “everything is great” part, you miss perhaps the most important step where you abandon all hope that anything will ever be what you consider “great”. And once you’ve accepted that truth, then and only then can you see that what is left, what is real, is in itself still kind of great.
