It’s been another unplanned hiatus from Real Joe and Ego Orgasms. It seems to happen every few months, usually a combination of things that take priority over blogging. The details will emerge over several posts.
I’ve been intrigued with trying to get better at watching my thinking. It’s been triggered by two of Eckhart Tolle’s books, Practicing the Power of Now and Stillness Speaks.
His stuff can be a little hard to read if new-agey lingo drives you apeshit. But I’ve found that some of the ways he describes some timeless spiritual principles to be helpful. Like this:
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not “the thinker.” The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence.
Nothing new under the sun there, but it’s caught my attention. A simple technique: I sit down someplace quiet, close my eyes, focus on my breathing or some other body sensation (my forearms on the arm of the chair), and then say to myself, I wonder what my next thought is going to be? And then I watch for whatever my mind serves up, notice it, and then do it again.
A little harder, but more interesting: doing the same thing when going about my daily routine. While putting my pants on: I wonder what my next thought is going to be? Walking down the stairs. Making coffee. Filling the humidifier. I wonder what my next thought is going to be?
Hardest of all: when talking and listening to someone. “Hey, Sweetie, good morning.” I wonder what my next thought is going to be?
I’ve done this before in my feeble attempts at meditation. I’ve focused on the now (eg, the 5-5-5 technique) in routine as well as anxiety-producing situations. And I use journal writing to examine my mistaken ideas whenever I’m troubled about something.
But I’ve never really made an attempt to watch the thinker while staying present, also while — and this is significant, methinks — keeping a small part of my mind aware that there’s a higher (deeper?) level of consciousness to the whole scene. “Aware of being aware,” is how many have described it. It’s cool. And somewhat strange, because it’s a way of reliably activating a sense of peace that I don’t normally experience.
When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice — the thinker — but the one who is aware of it. Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.
I part company with Tolle a bit when he says it’s enough to recognize the thought non-judgmentally and then go back to the now. It works better for me to examine it for mistaken thinking. More on that later.