(From Handbook For Humans)
How, then, to awaken to our deeper clarity, the one that responds more appropriately to situations?
A key notion is to become aware of the mind as a kind of mechanism, as something that automatically functions to produce thoughts and emotions. Notice that we don’t need to do anything to cause those thoughts and feelings to be there in our mind. They come by themselves.
In this metaphor the mind can be compared to a computer. It receives input (sensations and mind states), processes it (genetic and learned programs), and then outputs the results (mind states and behavior). We can intervene to change our progression of mental states, but if we don’t do so the process goes on by itself, like breathing.
Awakening begins as we begin to see the automaticity of this—the production of thoughts and emotions as a mechanism and not as our consciousness itself. This gradual process of dis-identification with the mechanism slowly begins to set us free from it.
Let’s return to our example. There I was, driving home feeling depressed after the seminar. And I was totally identified with those depressed thoughts and feelings. When a thought of futility or hopelessness floated through my consciousness, for instance, it didn’t seem to me that I was having a thought in my mind. No, it seemed to me that I was experiencing the very truth. That was my identification.
At that time I had practiced a little mindfulness while sitting in meditation, but hadn’t been able to apply it when in the throes of a full-scale emotion in daily life. But I remembered, and resolved to try it right there. Then, for the first time in my life concerning a negative state, a strange and wonderful thing happened: I was able to jump outside of my identification. Just a shift in perspective and suddenly everything was different.
Suddenly I was outside of the feelings and thoughts, looking at them as feelings and thoughts. Suddenly it was just feelings and thoughts; it wasn’t who I was any longer, it wasn’t reality. It was just an end-product of the mind-mechanism, and I could see it as what it really was. The identification was broken; the spell was temporarily broken.
When that happened, I suddenly felt liberated. I was no longer the prisoner of that series of thoughts and feelings. I could have those thoughts and feelings rather than be them.
I wasn’t rejecting them or embracing them or distracting myself from them. Neither was I forming opinions about them. I was simply watching them. But that subtle shift, from being them to watching them, made all the difference in the world. For that moment, I was free.
Of course the moment passed soon enough and then I was caught up again. The next series of thoughts and emotions caught me and I forgot all about awakening from my continuing dream. It’s very easy to be caught up again in identification with our states of mind, because that’s how we normally spend our time.
So it’s very helpful to set aside some time each day, perhaps just 10 or 20 minutes to start, when we can deliberately practice this process of observation and dis-identification, and do so without the distractions of everyday life. It’s been called many names by different traditions: mindfulness, witnessing, bare attention, vipassana, zazen, insight meditation, choiceless awareness, and so on. But for our purposes let’s just call it mindfulness.
© 1997 by James Sloman
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