I think a lot. So do you — just pay attention. It’s inevitable.
Sometimes I catch myself trying to quiet the mind, unfocusing, often without success. It’s a continuous torrent of ideas, memories, possibilities, regrets, hopes and fears. All empty. All with zero credibility, even though for nearly fifty years I took all of it with impressive seriousness.
One day I stopped taking seriously everything my head produced. It wasn’t exactly a decision. It was more like exhaustion from decades of accumulated thoughts about thoughts, plans about plans, worries piled on top of worries that never materialized. You know this pattern: the mind grabs whatever is in front of it, an unanswered email, yesterday’s conversation, an end-of-month bill, and turns it into a complete script of catastrophe or salvation, all before the matter in question has even decided its outcome. That specific kind of thinking, the one that philosophizes, anticipates, judges and gets nowhere, can be dropped at any moment. As long as you understand where it comes from.
To understand where your thoughts come from, try this right now: look for the exact place from which your next thought will emerge. Stay still for a moment and observe. What did you find? Probably nothing. Silence before the word. A borderless space that precedes any mental content. It’s the same experience as trying to grab your own hand with itself. The instrument and the object are the same thing, and the attempt dissolves before it begins.
Another way to do this is to try to identify the thinker, that character I spent many years believing was installed behind my eyes, between my ears, inside my head, from where most Westerners think they see and understand the world. Some traditions insist it lives in the heart or solar plexus. Each school has a map, but the territory is empty.
Thoughts arise and dissolve on their own, the same way a rain cloud forms in the sky and disappears, indifferent to everything. The difference is that we look at the sky and see the sky with a cloud inside it, while we look at the mind and think we are the cloud. I’ve been seeing the sky for a while now. The thoughts pass through, including the horrible ones, the ones I spent decades accepting as a definition of myself. They all pass. The background does not.
There’s an exercise I like to propose: imagine your mind is a movie screen. The film changes, characters come and go, drama settles and resolves, and you watch all of this certain that you are the spectator, the one observing from outside, separate from the story. But pay attention to that spectator for a moment. Try to locate them. Where exactly are they sitting? You’ll realize they are also a character, that the seat is part of the film, that the entire cinema, the screen, the light, the dark, the sound, is happening inside the same field you call yourself.
There is no outside. There never was a projection booth separate from the projection. You are the space where this content takes place, and that space carries none of the stories that unfold within it.
I look at that field and see what was here all along: the exact moment I’m in, without the layer of mental commentary that for decades covered everything I saw. And even when a bad thought arises, it passes through the field without altering the field. The screen doesn’t hold the scenes.
Before the next thought, everything was already here.
“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
The Dude— The Big Lebowski
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