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?