What I’m trying to say is that thinking, for me, gets in the way of being and doing. I have an addiction to words; reading, writing, talking. My life would be much happier if I would spend less time in the word-maze and more time doing and being.

I literally need to get out more.

Well that’s pretty much the perfect summation of what I was trying to say, and also why I will be out fooling around in Seattle in just over a week.

I literally need to get out more.

This is so simple it’s ridiculous: what about being and doing?

Pruney: that’s a great question which I’ve sort of explored in another post, but I can’t remember where. How’s that for automatic?

That’s funny, for me a lot of the conscious analytical thoughts become annoying. Or rather, I think somehow they are fundamentally tied into the “background chatter”

How much “conscious thought” is actually automatic? How constrained are your future thoughts by the thoughts you hold now?

This is a game that talks and has three things you can do with it: pull a knob, twist the knob, or bop the button. It has a rythmic voice saying “bop it” “twist it” or “pull it” in random order, and speeds up with time. At full speed, it is too fast for thinking, and you just have to react. At that speed, if you DO think about it, you lose. And there is a real temptation to see a pattern and anticipate the next command, which two out of three times ends the game, because there isn’t realy a pattern.

You guys are not talking about not thinking; you’re just talking about a different kind of thinking.

It’s a weird area we’ve gotten into, that’s for sure. On the one hand, I feel like it’s almost worth calling it something apart from thinking altogether, because the word “thought” is so loaded and the fundamental nature of what I’m after/describing is really different. But on another level, sure, yeah, it’s definitely a different kind of thinking.

Colin:

If I could get rid of all the underground thinking, or at least tune it out, and just stick with my conscious analytical thoughs, I’d be happy.

That’s funny, for me a lot of the conscious analytical thoughts become annoying. Or rather, I think somehow they are fundamentally tied into the “background chatter”

Meditative states can be sastained only for so long before one has to wake and endure the reality we all share.

As I understand, though, meditation is also practice to change the mind and how it perceives during ‘normal’ moments. I don’t think…hmmm…that thinking is reallly the problem, it’s the incessant chatter and background noise that is the killer. If I could get rid of all the underground thinking, or at least tune it out, and just stick with my conscious analytical thoughs, I’d be happy.

I’d also like to mirror what other people said about music/art etc, in that to really do it and to do it well is a meditative process. Same goes with sports. I play hockey and when something actually works for me, it’s because i’m not thinking. If I think like ‘ok i’m gonna go left around this guy, cut back right and then…’ it never works out. But when I just react, my body takes over and my trainning kicks in, I don’t think, my mind isn’t blank but it’s more that I’m now an observer to what my body is doing rather than my mind being an actor. I call it Zen Hockey.

This does not mean that they are all about “meditation”, but they are all “outside of time”.

Whoa.

Went I went through my “traumatic spiritual experience,” one of the things that motivated it was a desire to be outside of time. I took a spontaneous road trip to Duluth with my philosopher-boyfriend, who was very into Heidegger and Wittgenstein. (Sadly, not my boyfriend anymore). All kinds of weird and wonderful things happened on the trip, all because we made a deliberate decision to step sideways out of time.

Duluth is a magical city, a dot at one end of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake, a vast stillness.

I want to be fully present in the moment and not have my thoughts, fears, worries & imagination shielding me from actual experience.

Would you mind helping me out by giving me an example?

Ummm I know there is something I want to say about meditation and the power of suggestion… ie mind control, self mind control, plecebo effects… all random thoughts connected to some sort of idea I just can’t quite articulate yet. All this thinking about thoughts and no thoughts is making it really hard to form a thought!

Oh and just for the fun of it Food for Thought … isn’t meditation the act of thinking about not thinking… or is it the act of thinking about not thinking about thinking (If my head is gonna hurt I want someone to join me on this wonderful ride o pain)

it’s more like one second you’re thinking, and the next you’re not, and the next thing you know it’s 45 minutes later.

Oh yeah, I’ve had that happen to me tons of times.

y’know, i’ve had really excellent successes with meditation, and i can’t understand why people think it’s so hard. you’re just sitting, just stilling the mind (the “endlessly chattering monkey mind,”). as to whether the payoff is worthwhile, it certainly was for me. of course, what people don’t realize about the thoughtless state, the TRUE thoughtless state, is that you lose all sense of time when you stop thinking. it’s not like this amazing spirtual BLAMMO– it’s more like one second you’re thinking, and the next you’re not, and the next thing you know it’s 45 minutes later. as for people who don’t want to use meditation because they’re frightened of the time and effort, you’ll never know unless you give it a try. i was, too, at first, but with practice it really becomes effortless and enjoyable.

what happens *after* you’ve stopped thinking, now that’s where stuff gets fun. entire religious systems are centered on this idea (zen, for instance).

Since said state is also described as “unconditioned”, we should be able to deduce that permanence is a necessary consequence; if the world is viewed through the eyes of Eternity, no temporal happenstance could possibly dislodge it.

Said state must therefore be an entirely new mode of being, it is described as a “death” and a “birth”.

Not being a Saint, I may be confusing the golden state with “unthinking” state, but as far as I can tell, they are very closely related.

¤

ofcourse your destiny keep on reminding you
if you cant accept your destiny . you will get mad
and you start lieing . hiding . and the more it pushes back

many ways there are to change destiny
kaos and iching and sensing this pattern
the shamans way . our ur-explorers
and everybodys trying ofcourse
striving for peace and celebration

still . without aknowleding karma
the one golden rule in dao
one will get entagled in the web
of soical drama and guilt

but as one play out karma yoga
let it go . get over with the old
the organism shall stand tall
percieving everything still
not thinking at all
but understand divine will
always get on
through

you see know . dreaming is
modeling the future .
what they call imagination
is truly pure sensory input
long as you dont judge .
and so hold on to people
and events and objects
yes i guess
on the glory of holy godess
Eris ¤ bless

baba Norrland
gather them tribes

And perception works better when it takes up the whole stream, so knowing how to turn the dialog off can be a handy skill at times.

Also, “Dude” makes another really important point I think:

The seminars only work as long as you have the time, the money and the willingness to let someone tell you how to think.

Meditative states can be sastained only for so long before one has to wake and endure the reality we all share.

Most of the solutions people seem to be advocating are short term solutions, or in the case of drugs substituting in a new addiction in its place. I find this piece on Key23 (linked above) really compelling, because this author claims to have reached a permanent state:

http://www.key23.net/occulture/post/142

About 12 years ago I broke out of the mental trap, cut through the skein of thoughts and escaped into internal silence - a persistant state in which, if I am not actively thinking about something, there is only a silent light inside of my head, or an occasional AUM.

I credit that experience with saving my life: without the constant grinding down of language, the chatter, the psychic radio, the roaring evil nonsense which passes for our consciousness most of the time, it is possible to see things differently: life is beautiful, people are by-and-large kind, and most suffering is brief or something people can accomodate to. To recharge, one simply sits along and plays with the experience of being alive, makes some tea, has a snack, goes for a walk, plays with a puppy. Without a mind there to spoil every experience with it’s constant stream of definition, doubt, negativity, appreciation, discussion - without the constant jump into meta-psychosis where every experience is rendered meaningless by being assigned an arbitrary “meaning” - why then, life is profoundly good. All of it.

Woodworking, well, when your fingers are a couple of inches from spinning sharp steel, you focus. I do anyway - I can still count to 10 with my shoes on. And even with my pants on…

I remember reading a lot about thoughtlessness

That’s a funny statement all by itself.

Dude:

“Why do you want to stop the thought process?”

A perfectly fair question. The answer is I’m not sure that I do. I’m obviously a person who generates a great deal of pleasure and even a modest income from sharing and developing my thoughts.

In all honesty if you want to stop thinking get your hands on some prozac or zolaph (sp?) and numb yourself. It’s the easiest and the cheapest. Then you can become a drone in this world

I think it’s unfair to say that I’m looking to become a “drone” although from what I said, I suppose I can see how it was interpreted that way. It’s not that I want to check out and turn off from the world. It’s entirely the opposite. I want to be fully present in the moment and not have my thoughts, fears, worries & imagination shielding me from actual experience.

It is funny but there are all sorts of interventions that one can go to to stop thinking or rewire the thinking process. Anything from meditation to seminars to prozac are available to us. I’ve personally tried a lot of them. None really work in the way you would think they should work.

The seminars only work as long as you have the time, the money and the willingness to let someone tell you how to think.

Meditative states can be sastained only for so long before one has to wake and endure the reality we all share.

And the drugs only last as long as you are willing to be desensitized (sp?) from the world and more importantly yourself.

In trying many different ways to stop my thought process, to become an “adjusted citizen”, the sucessfull money tycon, or what ever lables the social norm tries to strive for I’ve come to realize, for myself, that the real question is not how to stop the thought process but rather, “Why do you want to stop the thought process?”

Tim you wrote

I mean the relentless flow of words and images and memories and fears and worries.

For me at least the idea of thinking of my last orgasim, the funny movie I saw the other night, the cool conversation I had with my dog, ect. are welcomed thoughts and ones I would like to have all the time. The other ones… Fears, worries, we don’t like those, not so much.

So this question goes out for you Tim… “What worries and fears are in your closet that you are trying to stop thinking about?” You don’t have to answer me (obviously) but answer yourself. All the stuff that people do to stop thinking is merely a bandaid for the real issue. We want to hide and a way to hide is to stop the thought process.

In all honesty if you want to stop thinking get your hands on some prozac or zolaph (sp?) and numb yourself. It’s the easiest and the cheapest. Then you can become a drone in this world. The really cool work that you do on this site would suffer greatly because you really wouldn’t care to question anymore, but hey at least you can break the addiction of thinking and stop feeling… anything. Or you could write down, to us or to yourself what is really going on and then try to work yourself out of it. You hold the keys to your “salvation” not the hand no your body …. The question is are you going to unlock the door?

I consider thinking the best entertainment I have.

Well it is entertaining, I’ll admit that right away. But if we continue in our addiction metaphor, then that still makes sense. Getting another “fix” is usually going to feel good. That’s why you have an addiction in the first place.

I’ve found meditation to be incredibly helpful for this kind of thing.

I can’t decide if I’m too impatient for real serious meditation, which probably means that I am.

It’s an annoyingly large amount of work for an uncertain payoff.

Agreed, I’m not even entirely sure what the payoff would be. Like, if I stopped being addicted to thinking, would I still be able to write, or would that just suck me back in again? How would I feel in the morning when I woke up? With the noise of my thoughts diminished, would I be able to better hear my intuition?

I’m curious what other techniques there are besides meditation which have the same ultimate effect or end goal? It seems like some of the Scientology training routines are geared towards something similar, such as Training Routine Zero:

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/06/26/training-routine-zero/

Years ago, I remember seeing some website that said, “You’ve reach the end of the internet. This is it. Please go outside and enjoy your life.”

I beat the Internet. The end guy was hard.

I’ve never followed any particular type, but I’ve practiced basic meditation in my room quite a few times and reached some very peaceful states bordering on near empty mind. Taoists say that when you empty your mind, it acts like a mirror and reflects Tao. I love that idea!

Well I was just thinking (hah) that completely stopping thoughts would be damn near impossible so perhaps a way of slowing down thoughts could be to not surround yourself with words which trigger thoughts. What I’m trying to say is probably explained a bit better in the interview.

Perhaps it involves freeing yourself from words?

Which involves what, exactly? Any description of the technique will inevitably entrap us in words. I will check out the interview though, thanks.

I also have a feeling that many of the Scientology training routines are also geared to deal with this dilemma.

Nelumbo Nucifera is the “Sacred Lotus,” and I’d read on the internet that it makes every cell in your body all, like, happy. And the stamen is supposed to be the most potent part, so I ordered some.

I smoked it initially out of a bong (I had to go out and buy one just for this) and I got a decent head-change, kinda introspective and happy. I listened to Jimi Hendrix for an hour or so and was super-groovin’ on the music.

Subsequent bong hits really didn’t bring me back up, so I decided to make a tea. I put the rest of it (probably 2 grams) in a teabag and steeped it for 20 minutes or so. It tastes pretty good, actually.

It basically affected me for the next two days. I wasn’t “happy,” but more like “perceptive.” Colors were more alive, and my internal dialogue was shut off. It was like I stripped away consensus reality and was looking at the world in a new way. Definitely very pleasant.

I used to stop my thoughts with alcohol. But that made me an alcoholic. I stopped that two years ago.

Another herb that I just tried, this morning actually, is Sweet Flag (Calamus root). I chewed on a handful for an hour or two this morning and it put me in a really nice place. It’s like it “centered” my energy, and made me very calm and purposeful.

It’s supposed to be psychedelic in large quantities, so I’m going to chew on that shit all day long tomorrow, because school doesn’t start until next Tuesday, so I’m trying all those herbs I ordered from eBay after Christmas

I was hoping to get the Kava today, it’d better get here by tomorrow.

(P.S. the “damiana” reports on erowid are all B.S.- it doesn’t do anything.)

If you’re interested in reading the interview: http://www.deepleafproductions.com/wilsonlibrary/texts/wsb-inter.html.

Have you read Human Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind yet?

Yes, what about it?

I wish I could have like, 11 minutes where my mind isn’t circling itself like a wild animal in heat

Circling itself like a wild animal in heat - yeah, that pretty much describes it, doesn’t it?

It really is like an addiction - always looking for your next big score. Trying out progressively larger doses of more dangerous drugs. Always hoping that one more hit will be enough to satisfy….

Hi, my name is Tim and I have a problem.