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Alan_Crowe comments on The Ritual - Less Wrong
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On the question of blocking thoughts, may I offer a personal anecdote, conscious that readers of Overcoming Bias will read it heterophenomenologically?
Years ago, when my health was good, I had a Buddhist meditation practice of great vigour and depth. Sitting on my cushion, noticing my train of thought pull into the station of consciousness, refusing to board the train and watching the thoughts leave, I would become more and more aware that it was the same old crap coming round again and again.
Forcibly stopping my thoughts had always worked badly. I coined a meditation slogan encapsulating what I had learned: When thoughts spin round in your head, like the wheels on a bicycle, don't apply the breaks, just stop peddling.
There was little pleasure to be had, peddling away, only to see the same old crap coming back into view yet again. No peddling. No thought.
That was bloody scary. I was an intellectual. All these clever thoughts? They were me, my identity, my core. Without them, who was I? Did I still like cats? Did I still like music?
I needn't have worried. After I few days Mara noticed that my mind was calm and free from distraction. Did He concede defeat, admitting that another human had gained enlightenment and slipped from his grasp? No, ofcourse not. I had seen through the old familiar crap, but it was crap and there was no problem about improving the quality. I had learned to resist the temptations of low quality distracting thoughts, but all that happened was that my mind came up with more creative, more clever, more insightful, and more distracting thoughts.
Soon I was caught up in them, back to business as usual.
I see a secular moral to this tale. If you want more insightful and creative thoughts all you have to do is stop recycling the usual crud. You would guess that withdrawing your mental energy from the pumps that circulate the usual shit round your head would leave an empty silence, but the mind doesn't work like that.
That sounds very useful to me, actually. Many people have problems coming up with interesting or original thoughts.
I suppose the question is how does one gain from the clever/creative/insightful thoughts while not sabotaging the meditation; keeping a pad to write down the thoughts might work.
A new thought occurs, you write it down, and if it tries to re-occur, you know it's already written down and don't pedal any more. Then later when you aren't meditating, you have the thoughts handy.
Before doing that, I would first experiment with just how volatile those insights really are.
For example, put a bowl in front of me and a pile of small rocks, and every time I have what feels like a clever/creative/insightful thought put a rock in the bowl, then forget about it. Afterwards, try to remember what my insights were, and compare the total to see how many I forgot.
If it turns out that I can remember them later, then I don't need pads and etc.
(This was, incidentally, a glorious moment in my recovery, when my memory improved to the point that I didn't have to rehearse things constantly in order to stand a chance of remembering them when I needed them, but could instead let them go in the confidence that I could get them back later.)
Ah. I couldn't do that - either I remember it, in which case it was on my mind the entire time and ruined the meditation, or I forget it, in which case I feel regretful and obviously can't act on whatever occurred to me.