The Opposite of Thinking

Or, the paradox of meditating on nothing 

In 2014 I had a major accident on a cycling race in Cape Town. I crashed two-thirds of the way through and was taken to hospital with a broken collar bone and a serious concussion – serious enough that I don’t remember any of the race beyond the start line, let alone how I came off my bike.

While recovering at home afterwards, I suddenly had the time (plenty of it – I was booked off work for five weeks) to sit and stare into space, because when you’re concussed your brain is literally broken and you’re not allowed to use it much while it heals. No emails (and no worrying about emails, more importantly), no reading (not much anyway), no thinking. And this is how I discovered that it’s perfectly possible to sit and do nothing and actually enjoy it.

When I say do nothing, I mean literally watch the moments pass by. In my case it was sitting and listening to birds and lawnmowers and the sounds of other people driving to work and back, and whatever else came up. In short, I was meditating (kind of, and officially on and off – I did start to practice deliberately, on a cushion). It looks like nothing from the outside, but is it nothing on the inside? And why was it so, well, blissful?

When journaling about those early meditations, I pondered about those experiences of just observing the moment and realising that it was perfectly possible to do so continuously and be entirely content – in fact, suspecting that this probably was the best way to be content, that happiness is being in the moment.

Do you ever not brain?  

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to meditate means to “focus one’s mind for a period of time, in silence or with the aid of chanting, for religious or spiritual purposes or as a method of relaxation”; but it can also mean to think deeply about something, to plan or consider something mentally.

What are we if we aren’t thinking creatures? All the achievements of the human species derive from our imaginations, our faculty for conceptual thinking, the special ability to envision possibilities and calculate and plan outcomes – all of which happens in the terrifically powerful organ between our ears. And as far as we can tell, particularly these days, these organs are always on. So, if we are meditating, are we not thinking? Or perhaps rather, what are we meditating “about” or focusing on?

The first definition suggests that meditation should be done purposefully, with focus and a goal in mind – either religious or spiritual, or to relax. I wouldn’t argue with these outcomes, but I do like to reflect on our obsession with all activity being objective- or object-driven. Everything we do needs to have a purpose. Thinking is an activity – is meditation, or mindfulness practice, not also an activity? And if this is an activity whose purpose is not doing, but being, then what is its focus – if it even has one?

Imagine you’re a video camera

Back to my experience with being forced to “not brain” and so coming to mindfulness meditation:

In my journals from my time recovering and meditating, I remember writing something about the challenge of trying to hear a sound without spontaneously imagining and visualising the source of the sound – for example, the sound of my husband preparing supper downstairs. Was it possible to hear the noise of a box of frozen fish being torn open without having the image of the box spontaneously come to mind? In other words, when we perceive something – a sound, a taste, a sensation – is it possible not to add something to it in our minds? In other words, not to start immediately thinking about what we’re experiencing? 

Imagine experiencing something as if you were simply recording it taking place, like a video camera. What’s being recorded is exactly what is happening, a perfect mirror image of events. Of course you could say that “experience” is more than what we just see and hear – there could be other sensory elements, like the temperature of the air or the smells around us, but for now imagine the concept of a perfect witness creating a perfect transmission of everything there is to be perceived. No filters, no editing, no commentary.

Thinking is what we do when we attach something – the “commentary”, or interpretation, or simply something extra – either to what we perceive (for example, we start picturing the box of fish we can hear being opened) or to what we think about what we’ve perceived (we wonder whether our partner has read the baking instructions fully; we remind ourselves not to be such a backseat cook).  We “work with”, or get caught up in, thoughts, and that’s when it becomes thinking. More importantly, we also then attach feelings to what we’re thinking.

Thinking, or “directed thought”, is of course useful – it’s what has allowed humans to create and achieve what they’re achieved. But mindfulness says it’s possible just to experience and observe a sensation, and even just to experience and observe a thought, and take it no further (unless, perhaps, you have perceived that the house is on fire).

“Awareness is an uncomplicated and natural perception of events, situations or mind states that does not require thought.”

Rob Nairn, Living Dreaming Dying

In this way I believe mindfulness is the opposite of thinking. But at the same time (and this is an important realisation for those starting out), not thinking is impossible. Or rather, it’s impossible to not have thoughts. If you stop having thoughts altogether, it’s probably a cue to check your pulse.

Oh look, there goes a thought

As a beginner to mindfulness or meditation practice, you usually believe the goal is to “still your mind”. You are trained to find an “anchor”, like the breath, or sounds, or sensations: just one thing to focus on. As a result, you believe that part of the game is to cut out or silence everything else. And then your focus strays into – guest what? – thoughts.

Then, once you’ve begun beating yourself up for having thoughts, and beating yourself up for getting all worked up about having no control and no discipline and no focus, they tell you that’s not the point after all: it’s impossible to clear your mind of all thoughts. Thoughts come up by themselves, seemingly out of nowhere. We don’t even have to try producing a constant stream of thoughts: they just appear, like a by-product of human metabolism. And so we shouldn’t bother trying to get rid of them at all.

So then, we wonder, what’s the point? And what do we focus on?

They say mindfulness is not about pushing away or clearing one’s mind of thoughts that seem to arise spontaneously, but simply to observe them like appearances, like a breeze on the surface of water, or a cloud passing over a blue sky. 

(By the way, half the game is actually just being able to realise you’re having a thought. Most people don’t even see the distinction between themselves and their thoughts because they are fully identified with their own mind. They say we think of our bodies as a means of transporting our brains from place to place; by extension, we believe we (“We”) are in our brains and hence we are our thoughts.)

Eventually, after focusing on only your breath and observing thoughts pass by, and not picking them up or pushing them away, you are then able to observe everything that arises at each moment at the same time – breath, thoughts, sounds, all sensations – until your mind becomes like the mirror itself. This is the ultimate state of open awareness, and it is the realisation that meditating is simple, effortless being – that we achieve our “goal” by not trying to do anything at all.

At the beginning, however, it is easier to choose just one point of focus – and then, of course, to be mindful of when and where the mind wanders from that point, and bring it back again. That’s the only “goal”. 

From not thinking to mindlessness

Then there’s the other opposite of mindfulness: mindlessness, which I believe is actually a form of mind fullness, paradoxically. Mindlessness is distractedness. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking” probably actually means you were thinking, but about something else. We’re so afraid of letting our minds go idle – or we’re so damn tired of thinking that we can’t wait to zone out (which usually means bingeing on shows or mindless scrolling of your chosen social media feed).  The trouble is, all the stuff that’s filling our minds is likely to have nothing to do with what’s right in front of us.

We know that being constantly distracted leaves us faintly dissatisfied at best, but it’s easier than the effort of deliberately removing specific distractions one by one and choosing one thing to focus on. Maybe (for me but I’m sure for others too) it’s just that little bit more uncomfortable to have to choose the one thing of great(er) value than it is to be presented with endless random things of moderate to negligible value (or potentially great value, but of course the problem with social media scrolling is that we favour seeing more over going into depth because who knows what we might find!).  It’s the discretion involved that creates the “speed bump”. In short: I’m lazy, we’re all lazy, it’s easier to have the noise and then recover from it with more noise.

And this is why not thinking is so peaceful – because if you’re just looking at what’s happening right now and not adding anything to it in your head, there’s nothing to get worked up about. In fact, I’m pretty sure the definition of worrying has something to do with thinking about things you can’t do anything about right now.

This extends beyond when we’re focusing on meditating (i.e. focusing on not focusing on anything in particular, remember? But baby steps…) to when we’re focusing on thinking, or creating, or any of our productive daily work and activities. If you just focus on what you’re doing right now, there’s nothing to worry about. And the good news, of course, is that we know practising mindfulness through meditation helps you get better at practising focus in everyday life.

And finally

They say it’s impossible to think of nothing. Or to paraphrase a brain teaser, just try not think of a pink elephant. We can “meditate” on a pink elephant, zooming in on its pinkness and its shape and all its other characteristics; or we can just experience having the thought of a pink elephant, without pondering where it came from and why it’s that colour – and then observe whatever else comes up next. And that’s mindfulness, essentially.

You never know what your mind might throw at you next (that’s its job). And sometimes it’s nice to be someplace else.

The answer to my question of what there really is to meditate on? Not nothing but everything and nothing.