Transcription
You've got the cacophony of your unpleasant experience, and then you've got this place in the middle of it, or a parent place in the middle of it, from which you're trying to resist this experience, right? Or figure, trying to figure out how to change it, right?
So let's say you have a terrible pain, you know, somewhere in your body. You know, there's the pain, there's a strong stimulus of unpleasant sensation, you know, the burning and and stabbing and twisting feeling. And then there's this reaction to it from apparently some point outside the pain, very likely, you know, for most people, up in the head. I mean, most people feel like they're a subject in their heads, that is not, not truly coincident with the rest of their body. They don't feel, most people, for the most part, don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies, and these bodies can misbehave in various ways. And again, so you have a terrible pain, the pain's down there, let's say it's in your knee. You're up here now, a a a hostage being tortured by the misbehavior of the rest of your body, right? And you're resisting, you're trying to, you're trying to find some way of resisting these sensations.
And so it is with emotional distress or unpleasant thoughts, right? You know, that you can have thoughts that terrorize you. And all of it seems to suggest, I mean, this is, you know, this is the extreme case of stark unhappiness, but even in the best of times, right? Even when things are going really well, and everything experience is very smooth, and we're getting what we want, and that, you know, we, you know, our favorite treats are just an arm's length away, and we're filling our mouths with with gumdrops or whatever it is. We're we're gratifying this thing at the center of our experience, and it can never be finely gratified because experience itself is impermanent. It's just, you know, it's just you, you get to the thing you want, and you gorge yourself on it, and then you don't want a new thing. You want a new thing. You then you need a drink of water because the the this lingering taste in your mouth of chocolate mousse or whatever it is is too cloying and too much, and you got to wash that out. So that you're just, you wouldn't want to stay in that state even if you could. And there's some, there's there's kind of this rolling dissatisfaction even in satisfaction that we all encounter, even in the best of times, right? Even when you literally can get anything, more or less anything you want. And and yet we know at any moment it can be subverted by something terrible happening. You know, at any moment you can suddenly feel like you're, you might be having a heart attack, right? And then that becomes the thing that the this sense of me in the middle of everything collapses upon.
And, and it's, it is, it makes life, I mean, this, this again, the sense of of of being in this vulnerable center, right? It makes life this kind of long emergency that can be pacified by, you know, increasingly strenuous efforts to control experience, right? We have to control this thing because at any moment is this, we're constantly just, if you just look at any moment, we might die. Yeah, yeah, we're avoiding death. You know, but even, you know, even for those of us who don't think about death very often, and there are those people, um, we're constantly modifying our experience so as to to avoid discomfort, whether it's social discomfort or physical discomfort or just every, every correction in our body. If you, if you just try to sit still for an hour, you'll notice that all of the micro adjustments of in posture that you're now no longer making are made because you really don't have to wait long before you feel miserable. I mean, your body, the amount of pain you can get just sitting in the most comfortable chair you can find in your home and just resolving not to move is is quite extraordinary. It's just, you know, it's it's just there's no position that's comfortable enough that it will be comfortable an hour from now.
And so it is, in fact, true to say that for most people, I mean, literally 99.9% of our audience, uh, they couldn't pay attention to the breath for a full minute, say, even if their lives depended on it, right? It's just like, it's simply not in the cards. It's not, it's, you know, the fate of the world could depend on it, and someone who's not really fairly well trained in this, uh, just couldn't do it. And so that's interesting, right? What's interesting is that despite your best efforts, you get carried away by thought, helplessly, moment after moment. Now, being able to break that spell, being able to see thought as thought, so eventually, once you get some degree of mindfulness in hand, you no longer confine your attention to the breath or any other arbitrary object. You begin to open it up to everything you can possibly experience. So it's just, you know, sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and and thoughts themselves can become objects of mindfulness.
But when you can, but this is where this is the kind of cru, the crucial, you know, kind of almost binary difference which which produces an immense amount of psychological benefit. The moment you can really notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness rather than what you are in each moment. Because what happens is, in the default case, the thoughts kind of creep up from behind us, in some sense. They kind of come out of nowhere, and that just feels like me, right? So I'm, you know, I'm trying to, it's a reflexive identification. Yeah, you wouldn't act the damn things out if they didn't feel like you, you know? And so they have to have that impulse to action in them. That that's part of felt identity, right? So you're saying that, you're saying, and this is part of, I suppose, part of the Buddhist tradition, particularly, although not only, that being the the puppet of those thoughts is part of what prolongs suffering, at least under some circuits, especially being the puppet of them. Yes. Okay. Yeah.
So, and so this is, so, but the the people, you know, listening to us now can feel this. So, you know, you know, we're talking, and people are trying to understand the threat of this conversation, but it's comp, they have a voice in their head that's competing with this, right? They, you know, they're trying to listen to us, but they're also thinking, right? And they think, so they might think, what the hell's he talking about, right? Like, there's just some some intrusive thought comes in, or like, oh, no, wait a minute, he didn't answer the question. That thought, that that feels, if you're identified with it, if you don't see it as mere language appearing in consciousness or mirror imagery, right? It feels like me. It's like, that is the self, that isn't it? Doesn't feel like what I believe. Yeah, that's just that, that's always interesting.
Well, one of the things you do in clinical work all the time, especially in the cognitive behavioral field, is you help people identify those thoughts in some sense as as objects to no longer identify with them and to say, you know, just because you think that, it's not necessarily true. It's not necessarily you, and it's not necessarily helpful. And it is, it does have this dreamlike character of both coming out of nowhere and seizing, completely seizing the reins of of attention and identity and taking us elsewhere. And also, we forget it. It has, that's part of the totalitarian spirit of rationality, that proclivity. Well, but it is, but a lot of these thoughts aren't rational. It's just, it's just you're just rehearsing your experience. It's just like, you'll tell yourself the same thing 10 times in a row, and never, and you won't be bored on the 10th time. You'll, you'll like, if you just imagine what it would be like to externalize your thoughts on a loudspeaker for everyone to listen to, you know, and you were just, you just, it was just helplessly, you know, externalized. Every every normal person would sound insane, you know, because because of the the perseveration and the and just the redundancy and the and the strange structure to the discursiveness. I mean, this is this is a, um, you know, this is ever present. It's so it's so ever present that it strike, it doesn't strike people as strange. But to to be presuming we we have a we have a dialogue with ourselves as though the I could talk to the me and that made any sense at all. It's like, you know, I'm sitting here and you're getting set up for this interview, right? And I, I'll think, um, oh, I got to get some water, right? Now, I know if I'm the one to say it, and I'm the one who'll hear it, I know I'm, I know I need water. Who am I telling you? It's like, it's like I'm telling someone else, right? Who needs to be informed about this.
Well, you're probably telling the prefrontal cortex, and it tells the motor cortex. So, you know, that's probably the hypothalamus talking to the prefrontal cortex because it doesn't have direct output over the motor cortex. It's something like that. Yeah, yeah.
So, so there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and its connection to suffering. And one is at the level of thought itself, right? So you can, you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts, right? You can, you can, you can get some, you can triangulate on your your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself, and engineer a better conversation with yourself, right? And that's, you know, then yes, and cognitive behavioral thinking like a six-year-old, for example, and start thinking like a 30-year-old. Right. Right. And right. But what's more, a 30-year-old that actually has good intentions for you, right? Like, that you could a friend. Yes. Right. You can make your mind your friend. Yeah, yeah. Loved one, even. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Can you imagine that? So imagine that.