Can we learn to stop thinking?
Taking a break from the voice in the head
Can we learn to stop thinking? Not absolutely and not for long. Nor would I want to. I love thinking, when it feels creative. When it’s about bringing order to my day, or imagining new, better ways to do things, or putting myself in the shoes of those I love. The ability to apply intelligence to life and what it presents us with is a wonderful thing. Some of us (including me) love thinking so much that we prioritise it when we would be better taking action.
The tyranny of thought
But there is another side to thinking. If I am honest, the majority of my thinking is not creative. Instead it can feel like a compulsive recycling of familiar thoughts, many of them vaguely negative. If you’ve read this far, it’s probably because something in you would love to be free of the tyranny of thinking: the circular ‘what ifs?’ that are all about scanning for potential threats, whether threats to physical safety or the threat to our egos if we are disagreed with or ridiculed. And then there is the endless going over old wounds, reawakening pain or feeding resentment towards those who have hurt us. The hours out of our lives spent thinking of what we would like to have said or done differently, or how bleak the present and the future look.
Agitation over happenings which we are powerless to modify, either because they have not yet occurred, or else are occurring at an inaccessible distance from us, achieves nothing beyond the inoculation of here and now with the remote or anticipated evil that is the object of our distress. Aldous Huxley¹
Should we believe our thoughts?
This kind of negative thinking is at the root of a lot of depression and one approach is to question the validity of our thoughts. Do we have to take seriously every thought that comes into our heads? Is it really true, for example, that ‘I always make a mess of things’ or ‘Nothing ever changes?’ CBT and solution-focused therapy recommend deliberately replacing thought patterns that make us unhappy with more positive patterns: ‘I did a good job of parenting my teenagers’ or ‘I used to do no exercise but now I swim every day.’
We don’t have to only wage a defensive war on our uneasy thoughts, we can also choose to take the initiative and deliberately focus on the positive. You don’t have to identify as Christian to find St Paul’s advice helpful: ‘Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.’²
Opinions
Our opinions are actually only settled patterns of thinking, with all the unreliability of any other kind of thought. They are not even our own in the sense that we think they are, often being determined by our national culture, our language, the people we mix with, the particular media we consume.
Yet we are in danger of taking our opinions very seriously indeed and any challenge to them feels like a personal threat. Those who hold opposing views become totally other, separated from us by what can seem like an unbridgeable gulf. The ego identification with our viewpoint is so powerful that loosening its grip can be life-changing.
Do not strive to seek after the True, Only cease to cherish opinions. Seng-ts’an³
So questioning the truth of our thoughts, replacing them with others and focusing on the good can be helpful, but is it possible to stop thinking altogether, at least for brief moments? To have some respite from the voice in the head? For most of us, most of the time, thinking seems to be something that occurs independently of our volition. As Eckhart Tolle often says, in one sense it is as ridiculous to say ‘I think’ as to say ‘I beat my heart.’
Freedom from thought
Yet most of us have known brief moments of peace, a ‘peace that passes understanding’ in the sense that it seems to be of a different order from the conceptual, thought-based consciousness we usually experience. Such moments seem to occur when we are ‘taken out of ourselves,’ perhaps by encountering something new we have no preconceived opinions about. Or when we are given over to our senses, focusing all our attention on looking, hearing, touching or tasting.
People who engage in extreme sports or anyone faced with immediate physical danger that requires focused action can also, oddly, experience supreme calm.
The common denominator of all these experiences is a temporary suspension of the usual thought processes. So can the peace we crave be accessed deliberately by a choice to stop thinking? Unlike the beating of our heart, which is regulated by the autonomic nervous system and is outside our control, perhaps it is useful to see thinking as being rather more like breathing. Breathing happens automatically when we are engaged with other things but we can also choose to modulate our breathing — to take longer, slower breaths, or to breathe more quickly, for example.
There are various practices that can help us disengage from the dominance of the mind. Eckhart Tolle has several practical suggestions.
- Spending time with our pets who are not, as we are, taken up with constant evaluating, judging and trying to manage the impression they are making.
- Using our senses to look around the room or wherever we are, without labelling anything we see, hear or touch.
- Closing our eyes and then deliberately focusing attention on, say, our hands or any other part of the body. In the absence of seeing or touching our hands, we can still sense them in some way, perhaps as a slight, pleasant tingling. While taken up with these inner body sensations, we are not thinking in the usual way and often experience a deep calm.⁴
Watching our thoughts
Meditation is likewise designed to help us withdraw identification from our thinking mind into another space, that of the witness of our thoughts, our feelings, our sensations. We might focus on one particular external thing (a candle flame, a flower) or focus inwardly on a particular word or phrase, as in a mantra. Then, when other thoughts intrude, we gently bring attention back to what we are focusing on. This gives us practice in not being carried away by our thoughts but instead observing them.
The question is, who or what is able to watch and notice our thoughts and feelings? Is there a different, more spacious ‘I’, encompassing but not limited to the particular combination of body, mind and personality that makes up my usual sense of myself? An ‘I’ who is able to be outside the closed circle of my thinking and observe it? It is that ‘I’ — what Christians may refer to as our spirit — which we are identifying with in the moments of peace. Buddhists talk about the Buddha nature which is within every sentient being, waiting to be awoken, and the Hindu scriptures use the term atman to speak of ‘the spiritual life principle of the universe, especially when regarded as immanent in the individual’s real self.’⁴ This ‘I’ is able to observe thoughts, sensations and feelings because it is one with the spaciousness in which thoughts, sensations and feelings occur.
So perhaps the peace we crave is not to be found by being lost in our thinking, nor in trying to cease thinking altogether. Instead we can find ways to pepper our days with small oases of peace. Moments of dropping into a more spacious ‘I’ which is there, always available, hidden beneath our usual mode of consciousness. Being this ‘I’ means being able to watch, welcome, then release our thoughts, neither giving them too much attention nor ignoring them, allowing them to pass like clouds in an open sky.
Do not build up your views upon your sense and thoughts, do not base your understanding upon your sense and thoughts; but at the same time do not seek the Mind away from your senses and thoughts, do not try to grasp Reality by rejecting your senses and thoughts. When you are neither attached to, nor detached from, them, then you enjoy your perfect unobstructed freedom, then you have your seat of enlightenment. Huang Po⁵
Notes
- The Perennial Philosophy (Harper Perennial Modern Classics edn. 2009, first published 1945), New York: Harper Collins, p. 103.
- Philippians, Ch 4, verse 8 (English Standard Version).
- The Third Patriarch of Zen, from Hsin-Hsin Ming (Verses in Faith Mind).
- For Eckhart Tolle’s teaching, see eckharttolle.com. Also The Power of Now and A New Earth.
- Oxford Languages English Dictionary.
- Quoted in The Perennial Philosophy, p. 59.
