An exploration into thoughts and how we can use anxiety as a gateway to find the always present Self?
Where do thoughts come from? Who is the noticer?
I once encountered a quote that likened clarity of Self to calm waters: “when water is boiling you don’t see your reflection. But when the waters calm, you see yourself in the reflection”. This is an apt metaphor for exploring the relationship between the self and the nature of the mind, how the turbulence or excitement of thoughts could muddy the discovery of who we truly are. Or might I say, what we truly are.
For the sake of a thorough, experiential, and no-bullshit investigation, can we temporarily discard a few preconceptions? We start with the mind. For now, for the time we spend exploring this, reading this piece, let’s forget about the existence of anything called the mind. No one has ever seen it. Truly, have you ever seen your mind? Yet we are so sure of its existence. Hey! Stay with me! By now, you can at least agree with me that you witness thoughts — you know, those words and pictures that appear somewhere ‘within you’. You may say at this point say, “But thoughts are in the mind”. I get that concept but let’s put it aside for second and stay with what is evident in our experience.
The next thing we want to put aside for the sake of this article is the notion that thoughts are created in the brain. From your own direct experience, forgetting anything you've ever read, or anything you may have been taught, do you ever see your thoughts being produced in the brain? Does it not fill you with curiosity when you hear that the Eastern mind rationalizes thoughts as coming from the heart area? Now, I am not arguing that the brain processes thoughts.
With these ideas aside, let’s take a plunge into experiencing our experience.
It’s indeed captivating how we begin to scrutinize our thoughts amidst a tumult of negative emotions, such as anxiety or fear. In those moments, the desire to master our thoughts intensifies, yet the effort often backfires, intensifying the stream of unsettling images and words in our consciousness. Curiously, when things are going smoothly, we seldom question our mental processes. More strikingly, it becomes apparent that when our thoughts scatter, stirring unease, our perception of the world darkens, and our bodies tense up in self-defense. Conversely, when engulfed by peaceful or exhilarating thoughts, we immerse ourselves fully in these experiences, never pausing to control or amplify our joy.Have we paused to notice that even those pleasant experiences are happening all by themselves. No controlling how much happier you want, or reducing the happier thoughts. In stark contrast, when faced with challenging thoughts, our instinct is to try and lessen their impact, we want to dial the thoughts down- sometimes resolving to medication, drugs, sex or mechanisms that redirect attention.
So, where, oh where do thoughts come from? Be honest with this exploration. IIf you were to conduct a sincere search, you’d find it challenging to pinpoint the exact origin of thoughts. Should you gesture towards your head, it’s unlikely you’d be able to specify whether thoughts emerge from the left side, right side, or center. Even if you indicate the center of your head, you might not realize you’re pointing to a very specific spot with confidence. Yet, if someone were to place a hand on your chest and suggest that your thoughts originate there, you might begin to question your initial belief. It’s an experiment worth trying.
If your eyes and ears were located in the knee area, chances are you’d believe your thoughts originate from your knees. That’s because the major doorways to our senses(sight, taste, smell and hearing) are located in the head. The eyes, nose, tongue and ears have nothing to say about what they see, taste, tough and smell but we have one thing that comments on everything: thoughts! Explore that! Can you see that clearly?
Have you noticed that that your thoughts come from within you? So there’s clearly a you, and there’s clearly thoughts that you are witnessing. So where is this you?
If there’s a you, and there are thoughts and we have troubled thoughts, who is the one experiencing the thoughts and is that one that’s experiencing the thought troubled? Is the troubling of thought not the thought judging its own activities? And do you see how the troubled thought is about a persona…a thought-created persona of a ‘you’? Do you see clearly that it’s a thought about a ‘you’ that’s in trouble or might be in trouble, a you that somehow is robbed of this very moment. The thought echoes things like ‘what will happen to me?’, ‘why did they do this to me?’, ‘how am I going to survive for the next two days’. These thoughts are about a character, a persona, that you honestly have never met! Who is this you? Still, I could bet, if you’ve not seen the illusion here, that you would probably point to your body, or at least reference the body as the one the thought is referring to. But haven’t you seen that you are not your body? If you were to have a dream where you were chased by a zebra with fangs and cat-like eyes, your fear would still be about the death or harm to the body. Yet, in the dream, the body doesn’t exist. It’s an almost direct correlation with most fears. There’s a belief that you are your body and your body is going to be harmed by the villain of your thoughts.
Let’s try something else in this exploration. If you can, and if you will, spend a few minutes after reading this sentence to explore the direction in which thoughts take you when an imagination of something terrible comes to your attention.
Notice the visceral or subtle reactions in your body to the signals of these thoughts. If you can, set a 2 minute timer and notice the subtlest twitches with the intensity of thoughts. It could be a slight readjustment of your body. But notice the direct linkage.
Now, notice there’s a you that’s experiencing the thoughts and the body. Notice there’s a latching onto thought and also a realization that there’s a latching onto thought. Notice that as you see this mechanism, the thoughts become less sticky. Notice again as you read this, that you may have been unaware of the sensations in your feet till you read this sentence. What is it that went to that sensation? You would say attention? Right? Yes, you are right? What is attention made of? That cannot be the mind if this ‘attention’ also noticed that it’s not the mind. That cannot be the mind, even though the mind immediately jumped to describe the sensations. Is it not evident that what’s aware is not contained in anything? But thoughts seem to be contained within it.
Isn’t it peaceful knowing it’s you that’s experiencing non-judgmentally, the judgemental mind?
There’s a you experiencing the world as you. Keep this gem in your pocket. You will need it sometime.
