Managing the Mind
Q: What should I do with all the crazy, demeaning, and perverted thoughts that come through my mind?
A: If these thoughts were yours, no one would dare to be within ten miles of you! They are not. They are just passing through. All people without exception, be they war criminals of the worst kind or exemplary individuals like Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama, are subject to unworthy thoughts. You have been around for who-knows-how-many lifetimes—something you may not believe—and in this lifetime alone you have watched hundreds of movies and been bombarded with thousands of images on television. It’s not surprising that these merge with each other and at some point produce horrific scenes in your mind. Just recognize that all these are not yours. If they were, you would be able to control them. But you can’t. Just know that they only make their appearance in your mind. One of the great blessings of meditation practice is to see that the mind-stuff is not ours. Therefore, it is foolish to feel guilty, fearful, or even uneasy about what takes place in your mind. You are not your mind; you are much more.
The wise and holy people in this world are worthy of great respect precisely because they are no longer vulnerable to thoughts similar to the ones that taunt you.
The mind runs about hunting for things on which thoughts can proliferate. It thinks, creates, and weaves fantasies because that is its nature. But we also have the choice of letting the fantasies go. The ability to discern and let go is a function of the wisdom-compassion that is always present in one who cultivates a spiritual life.
Some of us purposely harbor distracting thoughts—sexual fantasies, romantic adventure fantasies, fantasies of power, and so on. When we understand the nature of the mind and the path of practice toward enlightenment, we stop playing with such thoughts and let go of them as swiftly as they arise. Soon they lose ground and fade away.
Q: I feel “freaked-out” almost all the time. I think you know what I mean. My mind flits between despair, disgust, anxiety, and guilt. This, mind you, is my normal state. I think drugs must be the path for my kind of mind.
A: Don’t be ridiculous. This is the way most people’s minds are. Only they live such busy, outwardly oriented lives that these mental states are suppressed and remain hidden. If we took the “doing” out of their lives, what would be left? The kinds of mental states you are experiencing.
You have a discerning intellect to be able to observe these states of mind. You are already more than halfway home in recognizing the importance of moods and contemplating their volatile nature. Now, go deeper and see what is behind them. You will find that there is nothing to them and that change is the nature of the backdrop.
Like most people, you would like to see your spiritual life unfold in a series of warm, joyful, and pleasant experiences—a step-by-step junket through spiritual Disney Worlds and Expos. But the process is both more sober and more sublime than that. Diligently work with your object of meditation day and night. Make your meditation your priority. Don’t judge yourself or evaluate your life experiences in terms of fun and pleasure only. Be one who can endure what others would seek to obscure.
Q: Do you think that psychoanalysis is useful as an adjunct to meditation?
A: If therapy can stimulate profound questions about the nature of life itself, it can be a useful vehicle.
In the beginning, analysis will stimulate questions about the self. The client can contemplate what it is to be a “self” and ponder the problems it has caused. If the therapist is competent, he or she can help the client learn a lot about how the personality or self came to be as one perceives it to be.
In my experience as a client, a meditator, and a teacher, I have observed that focusing on the I-Ego benefits a person who has never before stopped to consider his or her life very carefully. If, in addition, that person learns to observe the process of inquiry itself, with all its doubts, worries, exaggerated concerns, and anxieties, then the person has advanced to the point of reflecting on thought and the patterns of thought.
If this process of careful introspection leads to an investigation of the nature of the self, the whole exercise of analysis will have yielded great benefit. The client will have some inkling of the machinations of the ego and will have begun to question and contemplate life to the point of turning toward an introspection into life itself. And in the end the client will have developed some skills and sufficient confidence to question the validity of the self, realizing how the self, with all its misguided desires, seeks out objects to stick onto with the inevitable result—acute suffering. This is the pain that led to therapy in the first place. In this way therapy can lead to contemplation and meditation.
Our way of seeing things has become distorted to the point where we must seek out therapies to encourage the mind to return to the balanced centeredness that makes for sanity.
Every wise teacher I have known has wholeheartedly endorsed moral discipline as the ethical fence surrounding one’s spiritual growth. Moral discipline establishes reasonable and sensitive boundaries for one’s behavior. In these stable conditions development can proceed; we can nurture our spiritual development and become better at the art of living, the art of meeting our karma head on.
However, when we attempt to deal with our life’s challenges, we encounter the insidious and frustrating fact that our greatest challenges cannot be solved at the same psychological level where they manifest as problems. We must have a tool—a therapy or a teaching—that elevates us above the confusion of our personal world.
We enhance our spiritual life by incorporating and integrating what we learn along the way, and each lesson becomes part of the foundation for the next. As our understanding evolves, we continue using skillful tools and therapies to uplift us further, and so we are continuously growing beyond ourselves.
Q: I suffer from intense pangs of anguish when I have to choose between things.
A: You suffer from doubt. Doubt deceives us into believing that something is better than something else—and then it pulls the rug out from under that choice and makes it appear that the other choice is better! You could expend all your mental energy just jumping back and forth between alternatives. Everyone except an enlightened being suffers from this difficult fetter. A fetter that affects our mind more than our behavior is difficult to see. Doubt is one of the more slippery ones. If we have the type of mind that is vulnerable to it yet doesn’t understand it, it can just about drive us crazy.
With meditation practice we can come to understand the tricks involved in doubt and get out of its grasp. If you look carefully at doubt you will see that fear is part of it as well. Perhaps you see just a little fear wedged in with the doubt, but that little bit is just the tip of an iceberg, for where a little bit of fear is showing, there is certainly a lot more hidden behind it.
Whenever you notice doubt arising, study the mind. Until you can manage doubt, you can hold on to the understanding that whatever choice we make, an opportunity or field for learning inevitably comes along with it. Any choice is okay if we approach it with this attitude. We make the best choice we can and then examine our choice, observing its effects and integrating that learning into our life experience.
Q: In my meditation I keep running into a painful sequence of memories that seems to replay itself at will. It seems I have to just be there and take it all, without consent or control. What can I do to stop this?
A: Understand what a memory is. When we understand anything, that thing loses its power. On the other hand, by not knowing and by looking away in aversion, the thing retains its potency and continues to be threatening because there is fear.
What you can do is dislodge the memory’s sacredness. Accept it as something presently painful but also changing. Contemplate the painful part. See how you can loosen the grip of time in this respect. These memories are flashbacks of images caught in time. You, the observer, are really only here in the present. The images of the past don’t belong to you. They are analogue rather than reality.
Through meditation practice we are able to look into the source of things. Examining the question “What is a memory built upon?” we come to know what memory is from the bottom up. It can then no longer disturb the mind. Understanding that memories are merely mental constructs strips them of power.
It takes some courage to work through this. If you spend some time and effort on it, eventually troubling images and memories will no longer bother you.
Q: I have several bad habits that I would be very happy to let go of. But how? I am not a meditator.
A: If you start off not being what you need to be, where can you go? However, we can use another vocabulary.
Habits are very, very quick to engage and go into operation. For instance, if you were a caustic, sarcastic person—or, to be more precise, if you displayed that kind of behavior—even if you saw the problems this caused in your relationships, trying to control this behavior would still be very hard. It’s the same with smoking. The cigarette appears magically in your mouth, lit, and there you are blowing smoke out of your nose. Fait accompli. And just yesterday you decided to quit.
Because habits engage so quickly, you must make the mind alert and even quicker. You can do this with exercises that undercut physical habit patterns and, eventually, mental ones. Without strengthening and speeding up the mind, the habits will always be a step ahead of you.
Q: I have taken vows and made promises to myself many times. Every New Year’s Day I proclaim that I am finished with cigarettes and alcohol. Six to eight weeks later, these vows disintegrate and I am left back where I started—except that I’ve humiliated myself again. Why do I keep blowing it?
A: The person who made the promise isn’t the same one who breaks it. Wisdom, which is a positive energy, generated the vow; ignorance, a negative energy, generated the breach.
Everyone has both these energies, the evolutionary and the destructive. By cultivating wisdom through meditation, a shift toward a vigilant awareness occurs and ignorance is no longer able to fool us quite so easily. Then the wisdom energy that initiates skillful action can sustain whatever we undertake. You are then able to sustain your vows because wisdom acts as a security system, protecting you.
When we decide to change our behavior, it is useful if we take a little time to perform a ritual to underscore the commitment to change. To a cynic, any ritual looks silly and feels embarrassing. But for someone who knows how to use them, rituals mark a moment in time with a powerful gesture. The moment they mark is now, for change can only occur in the present moment. We add weight to our intention when we include spiritual elements in the ritual. It becomes a spiritualized ritual, a sacred ritual.
I take candles, incense, and flowers to the little altar in my room. I place things that have meaning and significance in my life on this altar: photos of saints, family members, good friends, beings who have left this world, beings who have just recently arrived, and a photo of myself as a child. In performing a ritual, we dedicate the goodness that will arise from our vow to all the beings who we have brought to our consciousness, and then to all beings in the world, whether living or dead.
When we take a vow, we should vow for life. We can say we vow for life since this present moment marks a transition toward something better. Right in the very moment we vow to behave differently, we weaken a link in the chain of habits that binds us to the wheel of becoming, and we move a step closer toward our freedom.
Q: Since I began watching my mind, I have noticed that it is full of wicked thoughts. They come and go all through the day and even in my dream life. Sometimes I find a perverted interest in them and watch them for quite a while, like movies. I don’t do this with all the images that occur, but the ones I do watch often make me shudder. They come out of nowhere and I can’t stop them.
A: Since you are already a meditator, I will answer this in a way so you can pursue this matter in your own practice. First, who said these thoughts were wicked? Check into that. Secondly, who judges your thoughts? Thirdly, who observes the movies? As you contemplate these questions, you might also ask yourself, “What do these thoughts have to do with my life?”
One of the insights that will come to you in this contemplation is that good thoughts also arise out of nowhere. The thoughts you like, the thoughts you dislike, and the thoughts you are indifferent toward mostly come and go on their own. This is an extraordinary insight for Westerners, because it is so different from our assumed understanding of the mind. Growing up in a matrix of Judeo-Christian thought, we are inclined to think in terms of good and evil, angelic and satanic. So we categorize certain kinds of thoughts as good and certain ones as evil.
In terms of meditation, this causes unnecessary suffering. The thoughts you speak of in themselves are neither good nor bad. They come from nowhere and return to nowhere. They belong only to nature. If you want to be free from fear, guilt, and shame, you need to abandon the judging of thoughts and establish a new, more skillful attitude with the help of proper meditation practice.
People become anxious about the images and moods that come up in their practice. A skillful meditator recognizes these as gestalts, patterns of behavior that have no power to injure us. They are just functions of the process of thought. Thoughts intimidate us because we have not yet understood their nature—that they belong to no one. When we understand that what we understand is not me or mine, there is freedom.
Q: I’m beginning to be more painfully aware of how much conflict, confusion, and suffering is going on in my mind. Where is the end to this situation?
A: The end comes when you complete the job of purifying your mind. The conditions that generated the state of your mind as you now observe it have already occurred and produced their effects. You can’t stop what is already done. But you can stop adding to the situation by letting go of thoughts as soon as they are prompted by the sense organs or memory, letting them pass on by. By not compounding the situation, the habit of letting things stick to your mind and bother you will gradually change. In this new mental climate, the old memories, attitudes, opinions, and emotional biases will fade away quite naturally.
However, even after these bothersome elements fade away, there still lurks the last remaining pollutant that the magic whitener of letting go can’t quite eliminate. For that to go too, we have to allow the bottom to fall out of our hopes, plans, and relationship to a sense of self. The world of delusion along with the conflict it creates collapses, and the last remnants of suffering collapse with it. Then there is only knowing in the pure sense.
If you don’t watch your mind, who will? If the mind is left on its own without an observer, what does it do? And when there is an observer, what does the mind do?
The observer is on top of every situation: memory, fantasy, plans, revenge, compassion, doubts. It is the nature of the mind to run about searching for things to get involved with. The observer sees all this.
Learn to observe the observer. Bring it into your awareness and teach it to let go of everything. Letting go is Buddha-nature. The Buddha-mind becomes thoroughly bored and disgusted with the mind’s endless proliferation of thoughts and involvement with nothing of substance—and lets go.