The noisiest roommate ever
It's all in the mind. Whatever the heck that is
The default way of referring to thoughts is that you have them. They're yours in the way your thumbs or your ears are.
This isn't to say that you don't actively choose some of them; solving problems, making plans, calibrating competing options and so on.
They aren't the thoughts in question here. There is a point to those.
It's the ones that float in unbidden that drive me nuts. They are like passing traffic. Useless and distracting.
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Coming up to five years of a formal mindfulness practice most days (and momentary ones during the course of the day, when I actually remember to take full notice of my situation) I confess that my mind is as cluttered as it ever was with unbidden impressions floating by.
I write this with a Depeche Mode tune playing in consciousness. This has gone on for a couple of days. It's a song I haven't heard for ages and would never choose to actually listen to. It just came and stayed. Jimi Hendrix keeps popping up too, this week. Last week it was the Doobie Brothers. In each case these impressions arise the moment I wake up.
Most of my flotsam and jetsam thoughts are banal and fairly often quite pleasant. But they're uninvited and I have no idea why they're there.
In this way it seems they may not be mine at all.
This is not an original notion. There has been speculation about the origins of thoughts for millennia. Buddhists and other traditions that deny the objective reality of a self-referential 'me' say the whole thing is an illusion.
David Hume essentially argued that perceptions and mental events are basically all you are.
I hope he was wrong because I don't want to be my thoughts, because they are mostly junk.
Sometimes they are distressing and suddenly colour my mood.
Out of the blue, from nowhere I can fathom, something terrible appears in consciousness, the details of which I would't want to share here or anywhere else.
I'm not even talking about those arguably comic moments when I've idly wondered how many people I could pick off in town, carefully concealed with a silenced high-velocity weapon before slipping away to get on with my day.
[Yes, I have sometimes imagined this scenario. I have zero desire to randomly kill people. It's just 'a thought']
Those thought impressions don't bother me, but some really do.
There's the recurring one where something bad happens to Youna. I see, hear and viscerally feel it happening.
Often, during a formal mindfulness sit it's a surprise to watch the passing thoughts. This is half of the point of meditation. It can be a real eye-opener to notice the rubbish in your head.
A common fallacy about meditation is that it relaxes you. I only use one method - Vipassama - and the app I use (Sam Harris's Waking Up) says I've formally sat for 12,126 minutes using the app. You can probably double that figure for total meditation time, because often I just set a phone timer for ten minutes. I'd say that at least half of those 1,000ish hours (40+ days !) of formal sittings weren't relaxing at all - but also that in some sense they were the best ones.
It's useful to see your mind going ten to the dozen when most of the time you aren't aware of your state of consciousness.
The point of meditation (at least for me) isn't to relax. It's to be in closer contact with the reality of being so that you don't go around the whole time on autopilot.
You might ask why any of this matters and when I finish rolling my eyes at such a stupid question I reply because it's interesting and useful to identify patterns.
It used to bother me when I went around feeling unsettled or vaguely anxious for no good reason. This happens every few days and typically seems to last about 36 hours.
I used to suffer from really dark moods, which would last for ages, and I now know why. It was because I was living a crap life as a square peg in a round hole and avoiding the harsh reality that sometimes you have to do something about that if you don't want medication to control it. This turns out to be known by the kids today as 'choosing your hard'.
Choose your hard is an excellent frame for things like this. It's hard to be fat and it's hard to lose weight. Choose one. It’s hard to be in this house and it’s hard to move. Choose one. It’s hard to learn a language and it’s hard when you can’t speak a language. Choose. Or one will choose you.
But back to my dispositional occasional sense of unease and anxiety. It's become much more of a source of curiosity than distress at this point.
It seems to be cyclical. My personal journal has a 'throwback' feature and it's clear that I feel mysteriously unsettled and wonder about it annually, at certain times. Knowing that this keeps happening with no external inputs has made it more amusing than bothersome.
Oh, I feel kind of on edge for no reason. That thing again. Lol.
It did bug me at one time, but the One Weird Trick to stopping this from mattering was to really focus on it. Like boring into it and finding nothing at all there. It's similar to the pain management technique in which you focus hard on where it hurts, which strangely diffuses the worst of the discomfort.
I've seen this described as a technique of acceptance or decoupling pain sensations from suffering but I'm wary of the neatness of those ideas. Oh, I'm disconnecting my experience of this mind-clouding toothache from the fact of its ruining my day so that my day is no longer ruined because it's just another object in consciousness which doesn't have to be salient to my experience doesn't seem plausible. Whereas getting really granular with it - does it throb or stab, is it sharp or dully insistent, does it seem to move from place to place - oddly dials it down.
You have to get quite good at that and - thankfully - most of my fun with this technique doesn't happen with pain but with sudden insistent itches. Bore into the sensation until it dissolves. I've done it with toothache, though, and it does work. But, unlike itches which tend to self-destruct with enough attention, the pain comes back when you stop thinking about it. In this way Ibuprofen is a labour-saver as well as a magic bullet. Hooray for science.
But also hooray for things that just mysteriously work, like mindfulness.
The thing about properly noticing the shape of the mind is that it can stop you from being a jerk to yourself or others.
If you don't know yourself it's easy to end up stuck in a tangle of ulterior motives.
When these motives aren't noticed it often causes trouble.
Long ago, when I was living in a way that I now know is anathema to me ('family life' in a suburban setting) I suddenly blew a lot of money on some items that would turn me into a dance music producer.
Inevitably, I became nothing of the sort because my brain isn't wired to learn complicated machines like samplers and complex MIDI sequencers. But because I had no idea how crushed I was feeling every day I imagined it was a good idea to become talented and successful at a new thing.
Mindfulness practice would have saved me a lot of money then and also prevented me blowing up my marriage and family with a scandalous affair.
I was a jerk to people who deserved better, mostly because I had no clear notion of what was going on in my unaware mind.
Fast forward 25+ years and here I am, contentedly writing about feeling anxious and unsettled, with no plans to spend thousands on distracting myself from such feelings because I know that they aren't real. They're there, but they aren't me, so they don't matter.
In a culture of caring, understanding and kindness I could probably leverage this for clicks on TikTok in return for talking about how I am often anxious and make it part of my identity. That would be dull.
The reality - until we have something approaching an adequate explanation of the nature of consciousness - is not that I feel anxious. The only evidence is that there are anxious vibes and that they appear and disappear like ripples on a pond in consciousness. Not my consciousness. Just consciousness. Which is a thing that just is.
[Incidentally, Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ is one of those spectacularly wrong bits of philosophy that midwits still love to quote]
That's what happens when you notice things in consciousness.
They become less real.
“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chuang Tzu. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”
“The ten thousand things all transform and I do not know their beginning. They all have their ‘that,’ and I do not know their end. In their beginning and end, there is transformation. The mind is what controls the form, yet the mind is also part of the form.”
“The sage embraces the oneness of all things. They unify their mind, becoming boundless like the great Dao. In this state, distinctions cease, and consciousness flows freely, without obstruction or fixation.”
“To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”
Thanks to mystery person Clever Pseudonym for turning me on to Zhuangzi.