Making Sure I’m still here
I was riding in the car with a friend. After a time we had fallen into silence. I found myself having an imaginary conversation with a brother who lived on the other side of the continent. I’m an Italian American, so I talk to myself with my hands. My friend glanced over and asked, “Are you winning the argument?”
Having done a number of lengthy meditation retreats, I’ve had the opportunity to see my mind in different contexts. When we spend enough time sitting quietly, something interesting happens. We begin to see our thoughts without automatically becoming part of them. Something like looking out the window of a high rise at pedestrians scrambling below. The activity continues, but we are no longer caught in the chaos.
What surprised me from this perspective, was how damned crowded my mind seemed. Although I came to understand that the very act of seeing my mind from an objective perspective meant that I was accessing the open space of my mind. That was the vantage that allowed me to see the overcrowded streets below. And I saw that the preponderance of the crowding wasn’t brilliant ideas or profound insights. It was rote, repetitive narration. Endless thought streams in which I was explaining, defending, proving, correcting, and justifying… something. To someone. For some reason. The loudest conversations were defensive. I was making points to people who were not present, defending myself against accusations that weren’t being made, and winning arguments that never actually happened.
Then again, none of it was really happening.
I began to notice how much psychic real estate I had been giving to these internal debates. Within the enormous landscape of my mind I had selected the same arguments – or the same kind of arguments – repeatedly. Each discourse consumed me so thoroughly that there was little room left to experience life as it was actually unfolding.
Without space for fresh experience, all we really see are reflections of our own ideas. And most of the time those ideas had me at the center. “This is what happened to me” “This is how I was offended.” “This is who I am.”
“This is me.”
Perhaps what we are doing when we talk to ourselves is trying to prove that we exist. Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” He meant that the very fact of consciousness proved existence. But somewhere along the way, many of us began to believe: I think, therefore this is all I am.
We become identified with the commentary.
The strange thing is that our thoughts mostly tell us what we already know. They recycle familiar experiences, familiar fears, familiar hopes, familiar resentments. We return to them again and again, as though familiarity itself were a kind of refuge. Even when the stories are painful, they are comfortable because they are the devil we know.
Meditation practice offers us the mental space to notice this process. One of the most important moments in meditation is not achieving tranquility or reaching some exalted state. It is simply noticing that we have become lost in thought.
That moment is huge.
And then, of course, in time we might develop the willingness to return to the present. In time, consistent practice will build the neural pathways that will change our allegiance from escaping into interwoven narratives of habitual thinking to actually living in the present.
For years I believed my thoughts completely. If I was anxious, I became the anxiety. If I was angry, I became the anger. If I was defending myself in some imaginary courtroom, I became the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the judge, and the jury. I would stay up in bed cycling through what I should have said or what I might have done. This is our mind as a defensive tool trying to save us from imaginary evil.
Now, when I catch myself caught in one of those internal arguments, the first step is very simple. “This is just a thought.” Not a revelation. Not reality. Just a thought. I don’t layer a better thought over a limiting idea. Thoughts are thoughts are thoughts. A radio prattling in another room.
And simply noticing them is the result of the neural pathway development from meditation practice. We will begin to see when we are escaping into thoughts, arguments, complaints. And we begin to see that we have a choice to turn from that.
Thinking is not the totality of our mind. To say that thought is the whole of mind is like saying that the foam floating on top of a lake is the entirety of the lake.
There are depths beneath the surface.
There is a vast open sky above.
Yet many of us become frightened when we begin to glimpse those depths. We hear teachings about ego or no-self and immediately interpret them as attacks on our existence. We defend ourselves because our sense of self feels precious and necessary.
And in many ways it is.
But perhaps there is a difference between having a self and constantly proving that we have have a self. Maybe there is nothing to prove.
Meditation practice offers glimpses of possibilities beyond our usual patterned thinking. When the body settles into the present moment and the mind settles into the body, windows begin to open. We start to observe not only the content of our thoughts but the process itself. We see thoughts forming, dissolving, and reforming. We see the machinery rather than just the product.
And occasionally we encounter something we might find unsettling. Openness. Not the certainty, not the answers or schemes or solutions that our habit-mind presents. But openness. People often rush to fill that openness with new stories. We think we’ve seen God, glimpsed a past life, discovered a hidden destiny, or uncovered some cosmic secret. Maybe sometimes those things happen. But more often, I think we are simply rushing to replace one story with another.
The truly challenging aspect of meditation is not that it reveals something extraordinary. But that is reveals what we do not know. It brings us to the edge of fresh experience rather than recycled experience.
I’m reminded of a Monty Python sketch. The son is standing at a window looking outside. His father stands behind him and says, “Son, someday all this will be yours.”
The son replies, “What, the curtains?”
The father sighs. “No. Look beyond the curtains.”
“Oh,” says the son. “The window?”
That is often how we live. We spend our lives staring at the curtains of our own thoughts while an entire world waits beyond them. Meditation does not ask us to destroy the curtains. It does not ask us to silence every thought or win every internal argument. It simply invites us to look beyond them.
To stop seeking constant reassurance from the familiar stories of who we are. To rest, if only for a moment, in direct contact with ourselves and our world.
