Tag Archives: mind

Thought Addiction

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Yesterday we began a discussion of checking out reality by observing our mind.  One of the first things you notice when you begin to watch the mind is that you cannot find anyone in control of it.  It seems to “have a mind of its own”.  In reality the 90% of our mind that is subconscious is what is actually ruling the show.  The 10% that is conscious is what makes it through the filters of our subconscious. How to establish a unified mind will be the topic of a future post.  Today, lets talk about one type of automatic thought pattern.

This pattern I call thought addiction.  It involves repetitious thoughts that lead to chemical changes in the body. Here is a personal example of it in action.

About two months ago, my work settled down into a nice pattern.  I had lost a major client earlier in the year, but a second client showed up with additional work.  As I planned a summer vacation, I noticed that I was constantly thinking about how great my work was.  I also kept noting how for the first time in over five years I had enough money to cover my expenses.  These thought were quite pleasant, but also quite repetitious.

I realized how much energy was going into repeating these thoughts over and over.  The pay off was that they were pleasant and I imagined that they helped me release some happy chemical as I repeated them again and again.  This is why I called it a thought addiction.  In my case I was addicted to a happy chemical, but I imagine many people use obsessive worry to produce a similar change in biochemistry.  Other people find the chemicals released with anger to be stimulating as well.

The release of happy chemicals is one of the premises behind the power of positive thinking.  I was learning first hand how thinking positively actually makes one feel better.  I can appreciate that this practice releases a powerful endogenous drug, however, I’m actually trying to weed out all addiction and behaviors that are based on clinging to certain states.  I can imagine a better state beyond such petty addiction.

Yesterday, I noticed a similar thing happening as I performed my last massage.  I kept thinking about my day off today and what I was going to do.  Again, I can only see the purpose as creating “happy chemicals”.  I was avoiding the moment and the richness of the moment, perhaps because I was a little tired and the massage was a two hour one so the novelness of the activity was wearing off.

True freedom comes when I no longer distract myself from the moment by essentially meaningless thoughts.  True freedom comes with equanimity and equanimity comes from the insights that are gained by exploring and investigating how I think and act.

The Mind

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The path to enlightenment involves an investigation or awareness of reality. The instrument we use to check out what is real is our mind.  And the object of our investigation is also our mind.

What is the mind?  It is defined as something that is invisible and aware. When we investigate it we find that it is made up of a “main mind”, which is basic consciousness or awareness and a whole bunch of mental functions.  The mental functions include things like discriminating (the ability to tell two things apart) and emotions (like anger, jealousy, etc.)

I have been spending a great deal of time watching my mind and its movements during my everyday life for the last few months.  I am absolutely appalled at what I have been discovering.  First, a great deal of my thoughts are just background noise with no real purpose.  These are repetitious thoughts that serve no real purpose.  Maybe the thought was useful the first time I thought it, but by the tenth time it serves no purpose but mind noise. This could be a thought like, “I need to get groceries soon”.

Second, many of my emotions come out of nowhere and are based on absolute garbage.  Actually it was about fifteen years ago when I realized during my daily meditation that emotions arose independent of objects.  What I mean is that I would feel myself getting angry and then I would find something to be angry about.  This was surprising.  I’d always assumed that we got angry about something.  I mean, don’t people ask, “What are you angry about?” or “What are you sad about?”  Instead, I found the emotion would surface first and then I’d find something to attach it too.  I’d feel angry and then I’d focus on how my housemates were never cleaning up after themselves.

I know suspect, that at least for me, the emotions were bubbling up due to traumatic and repressed situations from my horrific childhood.  Since at the same time I was not remembering the situations the emotions seem completely dissociated from current happenings.  However, I now realize that all emotional reactions are really based on some subconscious garbage even if there is no repressed trauma.

Two clear thought patterns that I have noticed recently are what I call “thought addiction” and “suffering over our suffering“.  I’ll discuss these in my next two posts.  In the meantime, just spend sometime today observing the things you think and objectively determining if the thoughts are helpful, beneficial., useless, harmful or detrimental.  It is an interesting task.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.