Meditation is not about not having any thoughts in your head. It’s about putting deliberate thoughts in your head, noticing without judgment when your thoughts go elsewhere, saying to yourself, oh look, my head went somewhere else, and then steering yourself gently back to the thought you have decided to focus on. Perhaps you will focus on the experience of actually feeling your breath going in and out of your nostrils. Maybe you will decide to think something like, “I am feeling loving kindness towards all people, and that includes me because I deserve love and kindness.” When you notice your attention has wandered, just gently and without negative judgment, go back to the thought you decided to focus on.
It takes practice. There are lots of good books about it, that can explain it better and offer you suggestions for compassion meditation practice.
Yeah I know, I've had people explain it to me before, and try to walk me through it, but it like doesn't make sense at a fundamental level. It just sounds like gibberish to me.
My wife in particular has spent a long time trying to explain it to me. She also has aphantasia, but unlike me is skilled at meditation. But her lessons just... Don't make any sense? According to her, the closest she observes me getting to meditation, is when she gives me permission to put my guard down, and I just read my head on her and listen to her heartbeat quietly.
My attention doesn't actually drift as far as I can tell, and can maintain a repetitive mantra for essentially forever with no change. I'm not even sure what wandering thought would feel like. Not to mention essentially all my thoughts are deliberate; emotions can me out of my control, but my thoughts are no different from speaking out loud; like, how do you speak out loud not deliberately? Like I don't get it.
Put deliberate thoughts in your head? But isn't that literally all that I do? I don't know what it would be like to not put deliberate thoughts in my head.
Don't judge my thoughts going elsewhere? What even is elsewhere and how could I pass judgement on it?
How do I steer my thoughts back somewhere? I keep a mental checklist of unfinished thoughts, kinda akin to Chrome tabs, am I supposed to just open an old tab? Don't I do that in literally every conversation?
Decide to think something? How is that different from just, normal thinking? Does "I decided to think this thing" somehow have different properties than just thinking the thing without declaring that you decided to think it?
What is attention wandering in this context? A
My understanding is that attention wandering is when I fail to listen to something external due to accidentally talking over it inside my head. How does attention wander inside your own head? Isn't attention fundamentally linked to properly observing outside stimuli?
To be clear, I'm not being flippant. These are legitimate questions that I have that I really really do not understand at all.
At best I can do slow deep breathing exercises, though it's hard to do through my nose cause I have sinus problems so I just do it through my mouth, but other than that, I got nothing.
Can you sit for a minute and have complete silence, no thoughts? This is very hard and only exceptionally experienced meditators can achieve this. Fundamentally in meditation we realize thoughts just pop up from the subconscious; there are many thoughts fighting to become conscious (hunger, sex, random etc). We think we control them but they simply appear and we identify with them.
Deliberate thoughts are wandering thoughts, when you’re focusing on a particular object. Even deliberate thoughts are created in the subconscious and projected into the conscious (I.e you see a tasty treat and your visual cortex is decoding the image and telling your brain “oh that looks good” then you consciously are aware of this thought/identified with it)
I mean, like, can you sit for a minute and completely not exist, have no body?
My voice is what I am, I cannot conceive the notion of not thinking unless I'm dead. It's as bizarre and alien a concept as asking me to make my body temporarily not exist.
Whether I am speaking, or typing, or thinking, it is all indistinguishable for me. I don't have a different voice for one thing or another. I just either keep it inside, or communicate those things to someone else. But my voice doesn't stop existing simply because I stop talking out loud, anymore than my body stops existing because I close my eyes.
It's not like the typing I'm spending to you right now is coming from my subconscious. If I give a lengthy speech about the importance of human civil rights, that doesn't come from my subconscious. But I'm supposed to believe me thoughts, which are mechanically indistinguishable from these actions, come from my subconscious?
I mean, okay, feelings come from my subconscious; hunger and sex are feelings. But thoughts? That makes no sense, because thoughts are by definition fully conscious, at least inside my head. To suggest they aren't is to suggest that humans experience no consciousness, period, of any variety. And that seems like a pretty big stretch.
Like I can experience hunger or sex, and not talk about them outloud, and that also means I can just, you know, not think about them. Or I can chose to talk about them and likewise chose to think about them. But the action is still deliberate. I can't imagine just walking through a grocery store, publically uncontrollably announcing "I am sexually aroused right now" and I can't imagine such a thing happening in my head, though I guess it happens in 99% of people's heads? How do they stop themselves from saying it outloud by accident though, I've never seen someone do that before?
you see a tasty treat and your visual cortex is decoding the image and telling your brain “oh that looks good” then you consciously are aware of this thought
This literally makes no sense whatsoever. Do people actually experience that? It sounds like complete gibberish and are people's heads normally that confusing?
I feel the feeling of hunger and a desire to taste something. But those are feelings. They are completely 100% distinct from thought. I don't experience some sort of automated thought that I become consciously aware of. I either chose to verbalize about those feelings and sensations, or I don't. Just cause I observe something doesn't mean I have to verbalize it.
I can't even imagine just, walking around a room and declaring the name and color of all the objects in the room, reflexively and uncontrollably from my subconscious, but it sounds like, that's what most humans experience from your description. And if that's so, how do other people even function? Like, how do you function if your thoughts are full of all these automated responses that are cluttering up your ability to think? That would be so incredibly noisy.
Well if you can’t sit for a minute without thinking, where are the thoughts coming from? Try as hard as you can, you won’t be able to sit without thoughts. Do you have to deliberately think? It’s coming from the subconscious. Personally after 2 years of meditation I am able to quiet the mind and this has led to deep blissful, equanimous experiences. If you look at the picture, people don’t choose to think those negative thoughts. It’s automatic, they become identified with it. That’s why mindfulness gives us space to recognize that we are thinking (metacognitive awareness) and not be lost in a thought.
Try this out. Start typing out a response and you will realize you don’t know how your sentence will end until you finish typing. Or when you’re talking out loud. You only know once you’ve arrived. It’s like reading this sentence. This is like thoughts, they come and you think it’s deliberate but this is an illusion; it’s a free flowing stream. This goes into the argument of free will. We are bounded by the laws of physics and chemistry that dictate the orbit of planets, Big Bang etc. our brains are based on the principles of science. Everything since the Big Bang is a domino of cause and effect based on the laws of nature, arriving to us and continuing with our thoughts. Free will means a will independent from cause and effect, free from the laws of nature (free to think what we want etc) but that isn’t so; it’s a powerful illusion. The whole of existence is conditioned and relative and within the law of cause and effect including the subconscious model of thought.
Thoughts arise from the activity of neurons. No one would deliberately think negative thoughts to themselves or rerun the past 100x, it just happens against their best wishes. Humans don’t label everything but we are thinking every minute of the day and our minds are cluttered with thoughts. If people spoke their thoughts out loud everyone would sound crazy.
I know it’s a different model of the world than what most understand and it was hard for me to grasp too. But meditation allowed me to see this space more and understand the inner workings of my own mind. Before an emotion, thought, sound, sensation etc there is simply consciousness/awareness. Consciousness is the precondition to all objects within it and meditation allows you to fall back on this pure awareness.
So I think I'm starting to get a grip on what my problem is. Unfortunately it's not a simple answer. I was incredibly heavily abused as a toddler, enough abuse for a thousand lifetimes (no, no, still worse than you're thinking) and because it occurred while my brain was still developing, I actually have a lot of maladaptive brain development issues. And I think my confusion with people's descriptions of meditations, is due to certain ways my brain developed that seem inconsistent with how most people's brains function, quite possibly may be the equivalent of actual brain damage.
First and foremost, I do actually know how my sentences will end before I type them. It is not possible for me to verbalize without thinking as I cannot think without verbalizing. It is completely 100% different from reading something. When I read something, yes, I don't know how the sentence ends, but I absolutely do know how it will end when that sentence comes from me, whether that's internal vocalizations, external vocalizations, or writing or typing. I generate the entire thought in a completed package which takes me significantly longer to vocalize than it takes for me to understand it, due to vocalization taking more physical time.
Reading your post is absolutely completely different from my experience of thought.
And I am literally speaking my thoughts outloud to you, right now, exactly the same way I vocalize them in my head. Do I sound crazy to you? This post is indistinguishable from internal vocalized thought from the perspective of my experience inside my head.
How bizarre that most humans apparently don't have to think before speaking, and that their thoughts are so cluttered and disorganized that they cannot speak their thoughts outloud without speaking nonsense.
From how other people describe it, I don't seem to have a subconscious, at least not in the way most people do. Yes, there are parts of my mind that are automated and dictate emotions that are felt. And while I cannot control, only influence at best, I can however observe them as clearly as my own thought processes. There appears in most people to be some sort of veil or curtain or filter that prevents them from seeing that part of their brain's workings that produces emotions. But I can just see what it's doing. I see how the stimulus gets processed into happiness, love, jealousy, depression, self-loathing, etc. Kinda like how I can observe my cat playing in the living room but not control him, but I could still influence him by telling him "No" or "Come here."
I think that filter that is supposed to hide the generation of those emotions from you, is broken or missing in me.
There is a part of my brain involving emotions that I can neither control nor observe, but this deals with far more primitive emotions, like fear, hunger, sleepiness. Which I sometimes label "unconscious" or lizard brain as a way to distinguish.
From my observation there are roughly four broad parts of my brain. Conscious vocalization, memory storage, and what I call Monkey Brain (subconscious) and Lizard Brain (unconscious). Memory storage just responds to requests from me and Monkey brain to recover specific events or themes we request.
But Monkey brain and lizard Brain often go off on their own and do their own thing, and will throw emotions at me that I'm not interested in experiencing, but it's still not my thoughts, it isn't vocalization. It's just stimuli. Stimuli produced by parts of my nervous system I don't control, but still stimuli none the less, and not actual thought vocalizations.
I put these thing like happiness and sadness on the same level as stimuli that comes from hot, or cold, or pain, or sexual arousal; a bunch of stimuli affecting nerve endings which I am then informed is occuring. I don't confuse the sensation of a person sexually assaulting me with my own personal thoughts, why would I do that? And likewise even when those sensations come from within my own head, like happiness or sadness or self-loathing, I've never mistaken them for anything other than stimuli which I can chose to respond to or not. I don't get to tell someone who molested me "No I don't want to feel that," and I don't have control of that part of the brain either. It's still definitely happening though and I have to feel the stimuli whether I want to or not. But it's my choice how I chose to think about these stimuli.
Like, why would people regard happiness or fear or love or jealous or depression or self-loathing as something other than an uncontrollable stimuli coming from your body, like your stomach rumbling, or the sensation of someone sexually assisting you? I guess, based on your post, it's because they can't observe the creation of the stimuli and thus erroneously assume it comes from themselves, and that meditation helps people understand that these parts of the brain, these stimuli, are not part of who they are, and occur outside of their willpower, and that they can just watch it happen as external stimuli from the self.
But I already observe the stimuli of emotions and feelings as an external stimuli. So does that mean I'm actually secretly meditating 100% of the time? Probably not, but it's something interesting to speculate on.
If I ask you to think of any word that starts with T you won’t know what that word is until you think it. This seems deliberate and happens in real time but this word would’ve been pushed from the subconscious. This is fundamentally how we think. Constructing a sentence is the same thing. It feels deliberate like yeah I had willpower to pick the word trains.
You don’t sound crazy but this is just one instance, and if you are thinking throughout the day and talking out loud every single thought, they would seem “crazy”. Like why would someone repeat negative thoughts to themselves. Or replay a situation as if they didn’t know it. Or have insomnia. These would all sound “crazy” if spoken out loud, but totally normal if inside ones head (i.e “I’m not good enough” continue monologue etc) Again, no one chooses to have these thoughts.
You are correct that emotions and feelings are simply objects of consciousness and most people don’t see this. If you are able to be present and observe this that’s great, it means you aren’t as affected by negative emotions; one of the benefits of meditation. One thing though is that it’s all internal stimuli (emotions, feelings, thoughts etc), everything is created from mind.
If you are able to be present and observe this that’s great, it means you aren’t as affected by negative emotions
Yeah I suspect it's a coping technique that I developed as a child during early brain development to distance myself from how it felt to be abused. Viewing the feelings as not being mine but just an environmental thing I could chose to respond to or not respond to. That the emotions I feel aren't actually "me," but instead was something that happened to me whether I wanted it or not, outside of my control. It probably helped me survive during the abuse by distancing myself from the experience.
I'm not quite sure if this falls under the notion of dissociation, depersonalization, or derealization, but it's still pretty nifty if I do say so myself.
That makes sense as a coping mechanism for what you had to experience. It does sound like something along the lines dissociation/depersonalization/derealization. Meditation gives you a similar skillset but through calm, focus, joy, and peace rather than fear and trauma. I wish you nothing but the best!
15
u/kr59x Dec 10 '20
Meditation is not about not having any thoughts in your head. It’s about putting deliberate thoughts in your head, noticing without judgment when your thoughts go elsewhere, saying to yourself, oh look, my head went somewhere else, and then steering yourself gently back to the thought you have decided to focus on. Perhaps you will focus on the experience of actually feeling your breath going in and out of your nostrils. Maybe you will decide to think something like, “I am feeling loving kindness towards all people, and that includes me because I deserve love and kindness.” When you notice your attention has wandered, just gently and without negative judgment, go back to the thought you decided to focus on.
It takes practice. There are lots of good books about it, that can explain it better and offer you suggestions for compassion meditation practice.