CHAPTER 7
IF THINKING IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF OUR SUFFERING, HOW DO WE STOP THINKING?
“A crowded mind leaves no space for a peaceful heart.” — Christine Evangelou
Heaven and Hell: A Zen Parable A tough, brawny samurai once approached a Zen master who was deep in meditation. Impatient and discourteous, the samurai demanded in his husky voice so accustomed to forceful yelling, “Tell me the nature of heaven and hell.”
The Zen master opened his eyes, looked the samurai in the face, and replied with a certain scorn, “Why should I answer to a shabby, disgusting, despondent slob like you? A worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything? I can’t stand you. Get out of my sight. I have no time for silly questions.”
The samurai could not bear these insults. Consumed by rage, he drew his sword and raised it to sever the master’s head at once.
Looking straight into the samurai’s eyes, the Zen master tenderly declared, “That’s hell.”
The samurai froze. He immediately understood that anger had him in its grip. His mind had just created his own hell — one filled with resentment, hatred, self-defense, and fury. He realized that he was so deep in his torment that he was ready to kill somebody.
The samurai’s eyes filled with tears. Setting his sword aside, he put his palms together and obsequiously bowed in gratitude for this insight.
The Zen master gently acknowledged with a delicate smile, “And that’s heaven.”
It's not possible to just entirely stop thinking, but what we can do is reduce the time we spend thinking so that it gets smaller and
smaller each day that passes. Eventually we can get to the point where we spend most of our day not caught up in our thinking and live in a blissful state most of the time.
When we say that we want to stop thinking, many people assume that we are trying to stop all thoughts in general. This isn't what we're trying to do. Now that you know the difference between thoughts and thinking, we are working on allowing thoughts to come and flow through us while we minimize the thinking about those thoughts that emerge.
The most interesting and almost paradoxical thing about stopping our thinking is that we don't have to do anything to minimize it other than to be aware of it. By us becoming aware that we are thinking and that it is the root cause of all our suffering, it automatically makes us conscious to that fact and we become detached to it, allowing it to settle and pass. This takes almost no effort and is done through pure presence in the moment.
Here’s an analogy from one of my mentors that illustrates this concept: Imagine I give you a bowl of cloudy, dirty, murky water. If I asked you, how you would make the water clear, how would you do it?
Take 15 seconds to see what answers you come up with before moving on.
Most people say something along the lines of filtering the water or even boiling it. What most people don't realize is that if we let the bowl of dirty water sit for a period of time, we can see that the dirt begins to settle on its own in the water and after a while, the water becomes clear on its own.
This is how our minds also work. If we let our thinking sit without disturbing it by trying to "filter" or "boil" it, the thinking will settle down on its own and our minds will become free from thinking. The natural state of water is clear, and the natural state of our minds is also clear, if we do not disturb it.
If life begins to feel unclear, disorganized, stressful and you're not sure what to do next, you now know that it's only because your thinking is stirring up the dirt, making your mind cloudy and difficult to
see ahead. You can use this as an indicator to help you realize that you're thinking way too much.
Once we become aware of the fact that we are only feeling what we're thinking and that thinking is the root cause of our unpleasant experience, we see it for what it truly is. Then we allow it to settle by giving it space, and slowly we will see how we begin to have a clear mind again.
You can also compare thinking to quicksand. The more that we fight our thinking, the more it amplifies the negative emotions and the worse it gets. The same is true for quicksand. If we’re in quicksand, the way out isn’t to fight it. If we panic and frantically try to fight it, it only makes things worse by tightening the grip it has on us and pulling us under faster. The only way out is to stop struggling and allowing the natural buoyancy of your body to take over to bring you back up to the surface with ease. The only way to break free from our thinking is to let go and trust that our natural inner wisdom will guide us back to clarity and peace like it always has.
If you find yourself fluctuating between thinking and non-thinking, know that it is completely okay and quite normal. There is no way that we can remain in a state of non-thinking every second of every day and if we try to make that a goal, we will cause ourselves to suffer by forcing ourselves back into thinking again.
We are spiritual, infinite beings having a physical, finite experience. Because of this, we are literally a living gateway between the human and the divine, so we will naturally oscillate between the two states of feeling anxious/stressed and joyful/peaceful. We cannot control or prevent the oscillation between thinking and non-thinking, but we can minimize the time spent in thinking and thus creating more moments where we do feel joyful, peaceful, passionate, and full of love.
Although not being able to control when we begin to think can seem like we are cursed with an inevitable fate, it is not something to worry about because we can always return to the state of non- thinking. It is just a part of our beautiful human experience.
What can give us true peace is knowing that we always have this state of pure peace, love, and fulfillment underneath any thinking that we may ever have at any given moment. That beautiful state we always want is something we can never lose, but only forget. But just because we can forget it doesn't mean it's not there. Just like when it becomes night and the sun sets, we know that the sun is always there, we just can't see it. If we thought when the sun sets that it may never come back, then understandably we will have a lot of anxious and fearful thoughts. The same is true for our state of being.
We are ever really one moment away from remembering that we always have that infinite well of clarity, love, joy, peace, and fulfillment. We will forget sometimes, but when we do remember and realize that we are caught up in our thinking when we experience negative emotions, that alone will allow us to return back home to our natural beautiful state. All we have to do is remember it, know that this is just our thinking, and have peace knowing that the sun is not gone forever and that it will rise again soon enough.
Having that understanding will allow us to also appreciate the nighttime for its existence and role in the Universe. From that we can see how it is meant to be a part of our human experience and begin to cherish its beauty as much as the sun.
