Tag Archives: mind

Suffering over Suffering

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My experience with thought addiction came a couple months ago.  I had been wanting to write about it, but I was waiting for something more.  That something more showed up a couple nights ago.

I am in the process of looking for a new roommate and a couple of men that had just landed in our state from Ohio needed a room.  They weren’t what I was looking for, but I’ve had good experiences with very short term rentals so I offered them the room for a couple of days.  Everything was fine and then this massive fan showed up.  Jon said he had some nasal problem and the only thing that gave him relief was blowing air.  Sure, no problem.

But it was.  I am used to a quiet environment and that fan was very noisy.  It was like a jet engine.   I noticed my mind begin to become agitated as I thought of reasons it was a problem:  “I can’t relax with that constant noise”, “He doesn’t really need it”, “People that use fans are ______ (stupid, intolerant, disillusioned, weak, etc)”, “Fans make nasal conditions worse”, “I am an expert on fans”, “He needs nettles”.  The thoughts were unending.  I am a very intelligent and creative thinker and I can come up with all the angles on why the fan was unnecessary and bad.

At first I decided that the problem was really all in my mind.  Clearly, if my mind wasn’t reacting with aversion to the fan and craving for silence then I wouldn’t be having a problem at all.  I was able to get a hold of the thoughts arising and not engage with them. I know from experience that when you stop engaging with the thoughts and believing them then the subconscious figures out that the thoughts are not needed.  My agitation diminished.

I was then able to decide what I wanted to do.  With further investigation I realized that I really did have a “reaction” to the fan and the constant noise that was biologically true and not just a patterned mental response.  It did agitate me even without the additional thoughts.  Originally my house guests had requested to stay a week, but I decided that I couldn’t last that long.  I decided that four days would work for me.  This would honor both my desire to help them and my desire to respect my body.

As it turned out, I got even further relief when they kept their door close.  I had assumed they needed the door open to allow fresh air circulation.  That turned out not to be the case.  This reminds me of the importance of clearly expressing my problem and allowing other solutions to present themselves. Since I was able to tell them what I was struggling with, they were able to come up with a solution that partially remedied my problem.

My physical reaction to fan noise is my “suffering”.  The habitual thought patterns that arose from that suffering had the potential to induce a far greater suffering than the original reaction.  It is the habitual thought patterns that we have a choice over.  I’ve hear say that “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”.  I used to be the worse at suffering over my suffering.  I wonder how my friends endured my endless complaints.  Having freedom from the optional suffering is refreshing.  I love my life now.

I also would be amiss to not point out that even the pain goes away as we progress on the path to enlightenment.  Long term, the pain is optional too.

 

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.