With deliberate and repeated effort, progress is inevitable.

When we are in the present moment, we experience life as it happens and as it really is, rather than through filters of anticipation, as when we think about the future, or through filters of analysis, as when we linger in the past. Most of us spend very little time in the present moment. We usually are either thinking about something that has not yet happened (and may never happen) or reliving something that already has. We waste each moment’s opportunity to experience what is real by focusing on what is not.

In summary, creating the practicing mind comes down to a few simple rules:

•     Keep yourself process-oriented.
•     Stay in the present.
•     Make the process the goal and use the overall goal as a rudder to steer your efforts.
•     Be deliberate, have an intention about what you want to accomplish, and remain aware of that intention.

Whether we observe our thoughts or they just happen in our minds is determined by habits we have learned. We may consider some habits good, others not so good, but all habits can be replaced at will, if you understand how they are formed.

Habits and practice are very interrelated. What we practice will become a habit.

You can create a “preshot” routine that functions in the same way for our workplace scenario, too. You decide on the reaction you want to execute in the safety and unemotional state of a nonjudgmental frame of mind. In that state, you are fully objective and make choices and decisions without mental or emotional clutter. As with the golfer, it is not a bad idea to practice your response: Imagine your coworker barking at you for no reason or saying something that is totally uncalled for. Now envision him in your mind as having no power over you. Observe him with almost detached amusement as you calmly decide how you will respond.

When you have a predetermined intention about how to react, that intention will, with surprising quickness, come to your rescue and give you that little edge in personal control you need to stay ahead of your reaction. Then your new reaction becomes self-perpetuating. You execute the reaction you want; then your internal reaction to your response feels good because you have protected your inner peace, and you experience the paycheck for your effort. This gives you the emotional and mental stamina to stay with your effort. Thus a new habit begins to form. Eventually the whole process begins to fade into the background as it becomes a natural part of who you are and how you process a situation.

Being aware that all your motions, be they physical or mental, are habits and that you have the power to choose which habits you will create is very liberating. You are in control. Remember also that if you start to experience an emotion such as frustration, you have fallen out of the process. You are back in the false sense of thinking, “There is some place other than where I actually am now that I need to be. Only then will I be happy.” This is totally untrue and counterproductive. To the contrary, you are exactly where you should be right now. You are a flower.

DISTINCTION: Clarity of mind vs. Clarity of understanding

We all experience clarity of mind from time to time; present and in the moment, with our heads free from superstitious thinking. While the flow states regularly enjoyed by athletes, musicians and dancers (among others) are a familiar example of clarity of mind, we all experience this in different ways and at various times in our own lives. Clarity of mind is, by its nature, fleeting; no one has it all the time.

Clarity of understanding is the degree to which you insightfully understand the inside-out nature of reality; the realization that 100% of your felt experience of life is coming from THOUGHT in the moment. The fact that you’re reading this book means that you’re in the process of becoming one of those exceptional people who has clarity of understanding about the inside-out nature of life. Clarity of understanding is permanent. Once you experience an increase in your level of understanding, you never lose it. You’ll lose sight of it from time to time (if you’re anything like me, it’ll be on a daily basis), but your insights into the inside-out nature of life are still there within you; it’s only a matter of time before your wisdom reminds you and guides you back to clarity.

Of course, we all have an innate understanding of the inside-out nature of life at the core of our consciousness; it’s what we’re “made of” at the most essential level. So, as you keep looking in this direction, and allowing insight to dissolve the outside-in misunderstanding, it’s inevitable that your increasing clarity of understanding will continue rising. And the higher it rises, the more clarity of mind you’ll find yourself experiencing.

Thought-watching

The only equipment needed for thought-watching is a spot reasonably free of external distractions. The instructions couldn’t be simpler: we sit quietly and watch our thoughts. That’s all. In thought-watching, we don’t try to think about anything in particular; but neither do we try to block or interfere with the thoughts that happen to arise. We just watch, as if at a movie.

Almost as soon as we begin this exercise, we learn an important lesson about the mind: thoughts arise by themselves, even if we don’t strive to will them into existence. This truth can be deduced indirectly from our earlier discovery that thinking is often unconscious: obviously, we can’t be willing our ideas into existence when we’re unaware of them. But in thought-watching, we can observe in the full light of consciousness how thoughts come and go by themselves without the benefit of our assistance. To be sure, we can also exert a volitional influence on the stream of ideas. But the stream doesn’t automatically dry up as soon as we cease to exert ourselves. Thoughts continue to flow even when we stop pushing them into being from behind.

It’s only while we’re immersed in the business of living that we commit the longer versions of each trap that consume us for hours, days, or even years at a time.

Fifteen or twenty minutes of thought-watching, practiced more or less daily, will quickly lead to some remarkable discoveries about our mental machinery. The novice thought-watcher will find, however, that thought-watching seems to be a difficult business. Actually, nothing could be easier. But at the beginning we spend very little of our thought-watching time actually watching our thoughts. Instead we try to control the flow of thought—to make it flow in one direction or another, or to suppress it altogether. Of course we can’t simultaneously control our thoughts and just watch them emerge. The attempt to follow this contradictory program makes us increasingly tense. This is why the exercise appears to be difficult.

Strictly speaking, the traps don’t come up while we’re thought-watching, but rather when we cease to follow the instructions.

If we’ve decided to watch our thoughts, control is useless by definition. In this situation, every attempt at control is a superfluous mental episode, i.e., a trap. This is what makes thought-watching so instructive: when no work at all is called for, we observe with great clarity the various ways in which we invent make-work for ourselves.

It may be clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that we don’t stand to benefit by taking up these issues now, in the middle of thought-watching, rather than fifteen minutes later. And yet we do it anyway.

In daily life, we can only cast a sideward glance at these fabulous beasts as we pass them by, for we’re always on one mission or another. But when we’re thought-watching, we can observe them at our leisure and fully relish their astonishing properties.

The only way out of the labyrinth is to drop the issue entirely—to permit one of our successive failures to pass without comment.

But telling ourselves that we’re thought-watching is not yet thought-watching. It’s formulation.

When we catch ourselves in this subtle variety of formulation, we may once again take the first step toward an infinite regress by thinking, “That’s formulation,” as though naming the beast were the same as vanquishing it. But of course naming the formulation is just formulation over again: “That’s formulation—and so is that—and so is that …”

Sneezy … Dopey … That’s persistence. Stop persisting. Just watch thoughts. But that’s regulation. Stop regulating. Just watch thoughts. But that’s still regulation. Stop regulating …

“I’ll do it after thought-watching” is anticipatory, we tell ourselves that we needn’t decide now when to do it—that we will consider the problem of when to do it after thought-watching is over. But this idea commits again the very trap it wishes to disavow. We needn’t decide now when to complete the dwarf list, and we needn’t decide now when to decide.

Wishing to get back to thought-watching, we may berate ourselves for our failure (reversion), tell ourselves what we are supposed to be doing (formulation), order ourselves back to work (regulation), or reschedule the intrusive project for a later time (anticipation)—all of which are as different from thought-watching as the original persistence was.

Another strategy is to try to rush through the intrusive project as rapidly as possible so that we may sooner return to thought-watching. That is, we add the trap of acceleration to our original persistence.

The completion of the thought-watching session can’t be expedited; it comes by itself. We are just like a host waiting for his guests to arrive, and we make the same mistake: we begin to mark time. We may actually keep track of how much time is left: “One more minute to go … thirty seconds …” Or we may sit in a state of suspension, not actually thinking about the end but mutely straining toward it nonetheless.

When someone calls us from downstairs while we are thought-watching, we may adamantly resist the interruption, telling ourselves that we’re not going to stop our exercise for anything. We may even shout back with annoyance: “Don’t bother me now. I’m watching my thoughts!” But we couldn’t have such an idea unless we had already stopped watching our thoughts. Indeed, we quit watching as soon as we become aware of being interrupted. Had we abided in a purely observational attitude, the call from downstairs would have been no more than a sound, like the whistling of the wind. To experience it as an interruption means that we’ve already made it the first step of a new enterprise: getting the interruption off our back. There’s no question of continuing to thought-watch, for thought-watching is already behind us. This is what sets resistance during thought-watching apart from the garden-variety resistances of everyday life: when we struggle to ward off interruptions to our thought-watching, we’re trying to preserve something that has already ceased to exist.

Having finally come up with the seventh dwarf, we forget who the first one was and we must start all over again.

The attempt to order ourselves back to thought-watching catapults us into regulation; the rescheduling of extraneous projects for a later time results in anticipation; and so on. Similarly, we fall into an amplification when we try to reason our way back to thought-watching.

In fact, thought-watching isn’t a project at all. It isn’t a matter of doing, but of ceasing to do. Thought-watching is the condition we’re in when, remaining wide awake, we no longer do anything. Thus we can’t do thought-watching at all; we can only let it happen. If we try to stop an intrusive project by an act of some sort, then that act itself must inevitably become a second intrusive project. We get nowhere by cursing at ourselves, constructing good arguments, or laying down the law. The only remedy is to drop it—and saying “Drop it!” is not dropping it.

When we’re thought-watching, we literally have nothing to do. Yet we manage to create a monumental round of chores and problems out of this nothing. Is it any wonder that we needlessly complicate our work when there is something to be done?

DISTINCTION: Externally-corrected vs. Self-correcting

A system that requires outside intervention in order to fix it can be referred to as externally-corrected. If a car breaks down, it won’t fix itself. It needs an external agent to diagnose the problem, then take action to put it right. As the name suggests, a self-correcting system is one that corrects itself. It requires no external intervention. A self-correcting system merely requires the right conditions and enough time to resolve any issues. The primary condition needed for a self-correcting system to find its way back to balance is simple: an absence of external interference.

There are over 400 different psychological approaches or methodologies being used today in the worlds of business, personal development, coaching and therapy. Some of them are based on theories, others on heuristics or “rules of thumb.” Almost every single one of them is an application model, relying on the change-worker to externally-correct the client’s thinking (or the client to externally-correct their own thinking). The external-correction can take an infinite variety of forms; mental rehearsal, guided visualization, affirmations, techniques, psychoanalysis – they’re all applications, and they’re all working “downstream” from an understanding of the principle of THOUGHT. The worlds of business, personal development, coaching and therapy are awash with application models, attempts to externally-correct a self-correcting system.

Goals, values and ideas.

Faith is confidence you’re doing the right thing It’s a certainty that in the end - no matter what - something worthwhile will come of your beliefs and actions. It’s the feeling that pursuing this ambition is the best thing you can do for the person you are, and the person you want to be. When you have faith in yourself, you don’t require absolute proof of what will be, and you don’t need the buy-in of others. The faith that will power you to follow through isn’t built on certainty or even hope.

Some ideas are just worth pursuing because, in the pursuing, we get to be true to ourselves.

In pursuing your goal, are you honouring who you are? If your goal doesn’t promote values or ideas that are meaningful to you, then you may not be able to access the trust and confidence you need to make that goal happen. What is the fire that will sustain you through thick and thin? Is it the belief that you are doing something worthwhile? If not, then perhaps you are driven by a need of some kind, maybe a need for recognition or money.

Is human nature to adjust to circumstances, be these good or difficult.

If you have a list of options and each one is feasible and holds appeal, then there are only two courses of action to follow. The first is to block out a number of weeks to investigate each opportunity fully. This means conducting solid research. Failing that, the second option is to choose the opportunity that is good enough. Throw out the pros and cons list. Instead, write down what you like to do and your basic requirements for income, day-to-day work, home life, leisure time, and personal growth. Consider this list as your line in the sand - what you need for quality of life. Measure your options against this list. If all the choices meet your criteria, then toss a coin. It really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference what you select, because you will adapt, you’ll make the best of it, and you’ll experience some highs and some lows in whatever you do.