Addiction to thoughts
This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Very simple: you no longer feel like you have the choice to quit. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.
Because you identify with it, which means you derive your sense of self from the contents and activity of your mind.
Because you believe that if you stopped thinking, you would cease to exist. As you grow older, you form a mental image of who you are based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We can call this phantom self the ego. It consists of activity of the mind and can be maintained only by constant thought. The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self created by unconscious identification with the mind.
For the ego, the present moment barely exists. Only past and future are considered important. This complete reversal of truth explains the fact that the ego mode mind is so dysfunctional. It’s always about keeping the past alive, because without it – who are you? It continually projects itself into the future to ensure its survival and seek some kind of liberation or fulfillment there. It says, “One day, if this, that, or the other happens, I will be well, happy, and at peace.”
Even when the ego seems concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: it perceives it completely wrongly, because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind’s projected future. Observe your mind and you will see that this is how it works.
The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.
I don’t want to lose my ability to analyze and discriminate. I wouldn’t mind learning to think more clearly and focused, but I don’t want to lose my mind. The gift of thinking is the most precious thing we have. Without it we would just be another species.
The domination of the mind is merely a stage in the evolution of consciousness. We now urgently need to move to the next phase; otherwise we will be destroyed by the ghost, which has become a monster. I’ll talk about this in more detail later. Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thinking.
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attacking and defending against other minds, collecting, storing and analyzing information – this is what it is good at, but it is not creative at all. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place without mind, from inner silence. The mind then gives shape to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs occurred during a time of mental calm. The surprising result of a nationwide survey of America’s most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to determine their working methods, was that thinking “plays only a minor role in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself.”1 So I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don’t know how to think, but because they don’t know how to stop thinking!
It was not through the mind, through thought, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body was created and maintained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is much greater than the mind. How can a single human cell 1/1,000 of an inch in diameter contain instructions in its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each? The more we learn about how the body works, the more we realize how great the intelligence is at work within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects with it, it becomes a wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.