August 21, 2024

Has everyone found the drive and seen that there are things to read and watch? There’s no pressure but you might enjoy it. An interesting aspect of this is that we’re having these discussions and we’re simultaneously finding our way how to do that.

Carlo and I just did a video, which is also on the drive. Discussing on the meta-level, what these conversations are like, what we felt in the first two sessions, and how that translates to having these discussions to create LABs together. It’s about ego and being right and wrong and sharing our thoughts. So those aspects that I think we all experienced in some form or other and are just part of this process. So I keep repeating this is an experiment.

As we do this, we learn how to have these types of discussions because we’ve never had them before. We know how to debate. We know how to discuss our opinions and go back and forth on them. And we know how to sit lovingly in silence and share the beauty of our oneness. But that’s not what we’re doing here. That has its place, but that’s not this. Here we’re trying to co-create content. 

So we’re finding a balance. It seems a little heady and intellectual and we will find ourselves, feeling, oh, I don’t agree with this, or I do agree with that. And we’re interacting from the mind which I think is normal and good and part of this process. And at the same time, we don’t want to fall into debates or put our egos in there. So we’re going to discover how to do this. And that’s part of the fun. I hope it’s also part of the joyful process of discovering that this is possible, that we can do it. We already know how to do this. We just don’t have the practice.

So is there anything from last time or from the first two sessions that you’d like to share how that was for you? 

I took a lot of notes. So this session somehow sparked some creativity. I have not yet infused that creativity to Google Drive but it will happen. But I just let it flow and it was quite interesting what came out and what I have here now as notes, and I was just reading it a few minutes before so something is happening. So that was a great experience. Let’s see what will happen today. 

So whenever you feel there is something you want to share, put it on the drive because we don’t know yet where it’s going to go, but if we don’t capture it, it’s lost. So last time we discussed the theme thoughts, we’re going to revisit the theme thoughts again and again, and hopefully start anew, from beginner’s mind again and again. The reason is that we want to keep opening our minds and not come to some sort of conclusion. That’s part of the lab of the live augmented book, the living aspect of it. It’s a living discussion that doesn’t have a final answer, even though at some point it will be in some written form.

I really loved reading the session back from last time. Especially when it’s around the kids. Like how to get an eight year old to understand it. I have kids and they’re not busy with thoughts, so that was quite funny. To read that back that we want to make it as simple as possible. But for kids to understand it. I wonder if we are more busy with it than them.

I mainly scrolled through the transcript until where I had to leave last time and then read the rest of it. But as I was scrolling I thought, this could be interesting. Something to send out there to begin with. So people see trains of thought and they might be able to see themselves. They might go, that’s crazy. But I think it could be possibly freeing or enlightening to see the struggles of looking at these things. It was just fun to read what was in there without a conclusion.

That’s, you will see that’s also in the video that Carlo and I did which is on the drive. We were discussing how you never see this in a book. You never see how the author came to the final version, and what you will see hopefully in our LAB is how we come to these understandings. So every conversation we have and the revisiting of these concepts is important because it shows where people are, right? They might start where we were three sessions ago. So I think that’s something that might help people to see that process.

Some people have decided they don’t want to be a part of it and that’s fine. They may come back later and we may end up doing things completely differently by then. We’ll see.

I think we discussed this, but I want to bring it here as well. The ego comes into play big time, defending the feeling, whether to judge or to agree or disagree. And it’s very uncomfortable to sit with that feeling without a conclusion, without aligning principles we’re pre-programmed to go towards, that’s the interesting aspect here. There is always going to be some sense of that. I don’t believe it will disappear. That might never disappear fully, but that does not mean we cannot challenge it a bit and keep the conversation going in a way where we don’t formulate a conclusion or we agree on something, etc. This allows people to come in at any point because there is no conclusion. When it’s a conclusion, it’s wrapped up, it’s synthesized. Hopefully, with LABs we can achieve that anyone can come in at any point and doesn’t feel lost in the conversation.

So if you agree, I would like to go back to the concept or the idea of thoughts. And take a moment to completely clear our minds of everything we think we know about what thoughts are, what they’re for whether we need them or not, or how we would explain that. So the whole discussion, just completely new and not the whole nondual theory or everything else we’ve learned. But just now, in this moment, fresh, as this group, which is a different group than it was last time, and to see what questions come up spontaneously around thoughts and thinking. Ask a question and then we can jazz-improvise from there. 

I just noticed one thing on this topic of thoughts and thinking. The more we split it, the more we will get to know it. How is it known to say which we cannot control? They keep coming up like clouds floating and thinking perhaps is a verb, which our mind does to calculate, to anticipate, to even manipulate or to defend or whatever. So if this distinction becomes more clear, then one can at least see the difference that thoughts are many, so they keep coming. You can’t stop them. But perhaps thinking, as a verb could be because when you are more in the present moment, like we are here. There may be still some thoughts coming, but they will be less and less as or in proportion to our presence in this moment. So thinking perhaps can keep reducing with the increase in our presence in the moment. Thoughts may take a little longer, they are out of our control, but thinking as such can reduce significantly in proportionate to our presence. More and more in this moment as we are talking even there will be fewer doubts.

This is the biggest question. This is the question that I think of all the time, because even now when I’m speaking, I’m not thinking, I’m not thinking about what I’m going to say. And if I have a problem that I want to solve, it’s not like I’m not thinking. It’s like the thoughts they’re coming but I’m not doing anything. How to even understand where are these thoughts coming from? So if we realize when they just pop up but when we’re thinking, it just seems that they also pop up with the solution or whatever I’m thinking about. And I don’t know where that comes from until I understand how it works.

That’s exactly how I experienced last week. I experienced many actions that happened without thought. And it was like, what I was talking about happened without thinking. And the more I shifted my focus on that the more it was like, wow, very interesting. 

I have a question on thoughts versus thinking and what is the difference between thoughts and thinking. or is it the same thing? Because thinking feels to me like a doing that you can have control over and thoughts not. So I’m not sure what the difference is.

Maybe thinking is a little bit more an action. Yes. So you’re trying to actively do it. It feels a little bit more contracted, a little bit more narrow, but talking about thoughts, it feels as if they just come and go effortlessly.

And does thinking come from thoughts? Could be both ways, maybe. 

And we have to ask whether this is a real distinction. Is it helpful?

Something that just came to me around thinking, when I’m trying to think about something, it’s almost like I’m trying to access memory or something I think I know. What’s coming to me is we can focus, I can focus on that door. I wonder if I am actually able to focus on some sort of a memory bank. By trying, by thinking I’m trying to access a memory, like, how would I do this? Where did I put the keys or something like that.

There’s almost like this sense of efforting going on or willfulness. In relation to thinking as if we’re trying to do something or affect something. But with thoughts, maybe that distinction is they’re just popping up out of nowhere. And there isn’t a willfulness to it. But it also seems like that willfulness is a sensation of some kind. So then maybe one way to say it would be that thoughts are what we call the spontaneous mental activity occurring and thinking is when we have the spontaneous mental activity but including the feeling of doing it, of volition.

But isn’t what you’re, isn’t what you’re saying now, isn’t that just popping up? 

It is. Even though in my experience, the willfulness is also just a sensation that’s spontaneously happening based on circumstances. But I think humans, we tend to interpret that willfulness as something that is originating from a sense of self or an illusion of self. And then that creates this sense of doership of thinking of a thinker.

When we talk about thinking in our normal language, we’re implying a thinker. So we’re implying there is someone volitionally doing the thinking. Whereas when we talk about thoughts in our normal everyday language, we have more of this idea that those are spontaneous occurrings.

When the doership comes up, that is what I mean by thinking. That volition you mentioned, that is what I was referring to. And thoughts are just spontaneous. Supposing you go out of the house, you see somebody passing, the thoughts relating to that come up. Go to the market, see something, another thought comes up. So that is what I was distinguishing between these two. 

In daily conversation, we don’t even differentiate between those two. We use thought and thinking interchangeably. And there’s not even the realization that one is more apparently volitional and the other is mainly apparently spontaneous. Because if we really look at it, we probably find that it’s all spontaneous. But that could be very helpful distinction. 

I would like to put it conscious thoughts and unconscious thoughts. The conscious thought is intentional. You plan them in, if you are planning that in activity, let’s say an example of planning a holiday. So then all the parts of it to ensure that you can plan a holiday. The unconscious thoughts, they just keep coming on their own. So we might call them noise also. So I can probably differentiate between conscious and unconscious thoughts.

Three, four weeks ago, I hit my head and for a day I couldn’t think and I couldn’t talk. So I was present, I had a lot to say, I had a lot of things to do and everything, but nothing came out. I could speak if I wanted to, but there was nothing, no thinking and consequently no talking. For someone who’s, always writing and talking, that was quite a drastic shift.

And when we ask this question, and especially when we said, is thinking necessary? It’s necessary but not in the way I think we’re talking about it. It’s necessary as a byproduct of the brain doing its thing. Because in those moments I felt as if that stopped. It wasn’t serious, and I’m fine now, it was something mild, but nonetheless, that stopped. The words wouldn’t come, the thinking wouldn’t come, and I was still 100 percent there. I apologize for the imagery, is like in a bowel movement. It’s necessary. It’s extremely necessary to reduce the energy for us to move. And without that, I don’t think we can act or behave and I believe thinking is similar in some way. Like it’s a byproduct of our brain doing its thing to get the message through somehow.

I just want to say when I think about this topic, I want to clarify, thoughts to me mean content. If I have a thought, I’m focusing on the content of a thought, and so a thought about something. If I’m thinking to me means a train of thoughts. It’s the process of thoughts linking together in some way. That’s how I see thinking. So thinking is it’s not about content. It’s just a description of the train of thought. And that train of thought could consist of a set of logical steps. I’m talking from experience. Like a logical train of sequence, steps, or an image, or a set of images. I’ve never seen a thought, but I know I’m thinking. I’ve never seen a thought, but I’ve seen, I can see the content of a thought. I’ve never seen the thought of thinking. And that makes me think that thoughts don’t really exist. It’s just that the content is some form of consciousness. We could argue everything is, but there’s no such thing as a thought per se, in my mind. I can’t ever grab a thought. But I know I’m thinking, which is a train of content stuff. And that content is very spontaneous. So once content has been expressed, it’s like a set of dominoes that seems to follow through on that thought until it’s finished and then something else trains up.

Could it be a bridge from one domain to another domain, thinking and thought? 

What do you mean by domains? 

The domain of symbols and the domain of not symbols. When we have a thought, we have symbols and language and words, and we express them. But before we express them, there is a point before we get those words and images and symbols. So maybe it’s a bridge from one domain to another domain, which we can’t explain.

Would you consider a perception a thought? What is the difference between a perception and a thought? 

None. The perception is the interpretation of the thought, but it’s the same, it’s the same. There’s a thought, an interpretation, and a perception. A perception is an interpretation of a thought. 

We perceive a color. What comes first, the perception or the thought?

It’s almost instantaneous. As soon as you see a color green, there’s a kind of almost instantaneous naming of the color. But a baby wouldn’t have the green name. A baby would perceive the colors, but a baby wouldn’t have their concept of it.

So this is interesting because I noticed immediately that All the things I’ve read and supposedly learned about what perceptions are, what thoughts are, immediately comes up in my thinking. I’ve learned that there are sense perceptions, and then there are thoughts, which are like a sixth sense and another category of perception, which is not the same as the other ones. That’s what I’ve learned somewhere. I don’t know, probably in some Buddhist texts, but is that helpful, because what I’m looking for here as well in, in our discussion is which distinctions and explanations are actually helpful to us. And helpful can be that they open our minds or they make us see something or understand something more clearly. Or they’re useful in some sense. I don’t want to limit what that is.

It’s hard to start from a blank sheet of paper, isn’t it? Yes. It seems that everything has to be all one amorphic form going on. We call these things thoughts and perceptions and things to keep it simple, but it’s difficult to distinguish when you think about it.

Yes, and more and more the thought comes that we have no clue what thought is. And we use these words all the time, thoughts and thinking, and we don’t really know what we’re talking about.

To me, perception is understanding. Thought is a kind of information. Perception, once you understand it, this is my own experience of seeing. So because we somehow have to see the distinction, otherwise we will get lost in the words because thoughts are made of words. But perception, perhaps, has a little higher level of understanding. Supposing, as you were saying, colors. Once we know that this is black, then we don’t ask even in our head what color is this. Perception is once it is understood. The mind does not ask it again or interprets it again. The more we peel thoughts off, only then we will reach to the bottom of our own existence, so thoughts are kind of onion. A lot of layers upon layers. Ultimately, even I is also a thought. But before that, before we reach there, we need to peel off many more layers upon which this I am this, I am that, I am thinking, not thinking, thoughts keep floating.

So perception, I will rate little higher than thoughts because perception is something understood as we normally say, I know it, that means I am clear about it, what it is, whether it is color or it is a person, it is a thing, it is a machine. People say, I understand this, means the perception is clear. So no more questioning even in the mind arises.

And what if the perception is wrong, if you have to label it wrong or right?

That is again, the words, come into play. So we, the other one will say you are wrong, your perception is wrong, but the other one will say no, I know it. So again, we fall into the words difficult to distinguish, but unless we personally experience it, experience the distinction between these, it is likely to be misinterpreted. 

When you say that perception is wrong, what kind of wrong do you mean by that?

No not necessarily wrong, but different from your perception, perspective. So we all have our own individual, unique perspective. And you label it wrong, but it’s not, it’s not necessarily wrong. 

For example, when that whole, dress that was for some people saw it as gold and some people saw it as blue or something like that. So you mean something like that? 

Yeah, also, but that’s touchable, but perception could also be not something made of material, but also like a thought. Or religion. 

Okay, so I think when we were talking about perception, we meant sense perceptions. Touching, feeling, smell.

Yes, I suppose you could classify it like that. What you get perception is in which even before we classify them like that just perception of energy, just perception of vibratory energy of some kind. In the moment. The mind is making up some pattern of something in consciousness, but it’s perceiving it in a pattern. And that pattern is labelled by, it’s all one continuous process in my experience. It’s Arising from the ocean, if you like, the vibration, and then it’s perceived, pattern matched, and recognized, and then labeled, becomes an object. That seems to be the experience I have. There’s nothing there. It’s all an illusion in one sense, but it’s like just a mechanism. So yeah, you could say it’s expressed as sometimes these vibrations are sound, sometimes they’re colour, but that’s just because a particular type of organ has picked up the vibration, so we call it sound. 

And then sometimes it might be thought if it’s the brain picking up a mental vibration.

I don’t know whether thought is a perception. I don’t know. It’s an interesting question. But it seems like thought is some kind of unique labeling capacity of awareness. It can call things by a name, has a naming capacity, a categorization capacity, organizational capacity.

It’s not quite the same as. Like it’s if you hear something, if you have a, if you have an experience that you classify as sound before the, it’s the mind that is classifying it as sound, isn’t it? 

It’s thought that classifies it. 

So what I’m wondering at the same time is, if we don’t understand any of this, okay, suppose we don’t understand what thought really is, and we’d never figure out what thinking is exactly and how it differs or is the same, the things we’ve just been discussing, can we still say useful things about thought and thinking without understanding what it is?

That rbrings up the distinction between thought and belief. Because I feel like there can be thought, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be believed as if it’s pointing to something actually real or inherently existing. And if there is a belief there, so a thought imbued with some kind of energy, that seems to be what leads to an illusion of self and consequently suffering. And so I’d love to hear the group’s thoughts on that distinction between thought and belief, what makes that distinction. How does that distinction arise? Is that distinction even useful?

I would say belief is something smaller than a thought. Belief feels like thoughts cast in stone. 

Yeah, they are labeled. It feels like a belief is a thought well-held. A belief is quite simply a thought believed, which is the same thing.

And this goes back to that notion of contraction and openness for me, where what you were saying around set in stone. I feel like a belief is a thought that has some kind of contraction, contracted energy around it. Almost as if that contracted energy actually makes it seem like whatever the thought refers to is something that’s there and there isn’t actually anything there.

Like sound is only there when we think there’s a sound and believe there’s a sound. And like thoughts are only there when we believe there are thoughts that are there, but when that contracted belief or that contracted energy isn’t there, then everything is just totally ungraspable. And it doesn’t really matter if thoughts arise because. They’re not sticky in any way. There’s no investment, energetic investment into those thoughts, it seems. 

Would you distinguish between blind belief and belief which has some evidential basis? Because I, in my mind, I always do. I always think there’s such a thing as completely blind belief. For example, the belief that we’re a separate self is utterly blind. There’s absolutely no evidence that’s true whatsoever on any level. Scientifically, subjectively, or in any capacity. So it is a complete cultish blind belief. But the belief that there’s such a thing as gravity has some experiential evidence. It’s still a model, but it is a useful belief to have when you’re flying an airplane. Whereas the belief that you’re a separate self is completely not useful. Because it’s utterly blind. It has no evidence or basis whatsoever. So I just ask you, do you make that distinction? Or is all belief for you irrelevant?

I haven’t made any of that distinction previously, and I’ll definitely chew on after this session today. It seems to me that even what you refer to as beliefs that have some kind of evidential reality to them require us to believe in that evidential reality. That if we don’t believe in it, if we don’t posit that evidential reality as actual evidential reality, then there really is nothing to hold on to. We can use those such as gravity practically, right? This kind of gets to the unity of the absolute and the relative, right? There can be an apparent airplane that is using the forces of nature or flight to remain airborne, but it’s simultaneously recognized that none of that is actually happening.

So it’s like you can’t say either/or, right? It’s both and neither, and even beyond those distinctions as well. I think this touches upon our discussion around thought because it isn’t until thought is believed in that these paradoxes start to arise and we start to get contorted. Our minds start to get contorted around these apparent distinctions and dualities and so forth. But I think some of these distinctions can be very useful in working with people. And people who are still contracted around certain beliefs, we can make these distinctions to help loosen those contractions to some degree.

But fundamentally, do these distinctions, do they hold? I don’t know if they do, actually. 

All conditioning turns into a belief. So everything that we learn turns into a belief. This is how I should hold a pen. This is how I tie my shoes. This is what I like in my coffee. It’s a belief that I, and so all the conditioning that we have, turns into a belief of this is who I am. This is what I like. This is what I don’t like. So everything is a belief. Everything that we do is a belief based on a thought. All these unconscious beliefs, that’s what drives us. So everything that we believe that we should do or be or have, and that’s seen in the behavior of what we believe. But these thoughts that just pop up as a belief that they’re just thought, but the driving force of us is all belief.

I’d like to try something for the last 10 minutes. I’d like to try to take this whole thing and turn it around and start from joy, okay? If we’re thinking about finding joy, what do we need to know about thoughts?

Joy is something that stuck with me in this session and trying to find a way back to that. And yeah, thoughts pop up and thoughts happen so we can say that thoughts are real, but we don’t have to believe it. So thoughts are not true. So it’s real, but not true. And for me, that is where the joy comes in. If you don’t turn your thoughts into reality or beliefs, that’s where joy and freedom come in.

I don’t think thoughts come into joy at all. I think it’s irrelevant. I think basically, the way I experience it is the joy comes from realising that we are, whatever you want to call it, this happening, awareness, whatever you call it in your language. And that’s the only pertinent recognition. I call it a recognition. That’s just what I call it, but that’s up to you. But in that sense now, thoughts bear no part in that. But having said that though, having got that recognition and feeling joyful, I may have a thought which comes from that joy. That could be a pleasurable thought, and I wouldn’t wish to not have those thoughts. So for me, those thoughts are really beautiful. That’s all I can say.

I would like to put it as conditioned joy and unconditioned joy. The unconditioned joy is when you simply are, you just don’t do anything, you simply are, you meditate or whatever, and then suddenly it appears from nowhere. You’re not doing anything to get it. It simply comes. It’s just there in the background and it just shows up. So that I would put as unconditioned joy. Conditioned joy is something that I’m trying to fulfill certain conditions to get the joy, just like I mentioned the example of a holiday. So I know I’m working on it because I want to experience that joy when I enjoy the holiday. So all the thoughts which are leading to that are conditioned thoughts and conditioned joy.

Does thought have a role in unconditioned joy? No. Thought doesn’t have any role in unconditioned joy, because it’s just there, and that is why it’s called unconditioned. You’re not making any condition for joy to to appear, because that’s probably our true nature or the source from where it emerges. So you get connected to that. So it’s overflowing and you just experience it. You are there in the moment. And the conditioned one is of course what drives us to do whatever we do, because we expect that, okay, this condition is not there. When I am there after let’s say X, Y, Z, when I’m celebrating my holidays, then I will get that joy. So my intention and my actions are driven to get that joy, X, Y, in the future, and I’m working in the present to get to that future and that joy will come then. So that’s a condition joy.

It’s all completely natural and okay that thoughts are also an expression of this whether they’re there or not. That doesn’t change the fact that this is always going to be this and that’s never not going to be the case in relation to joy. I think it’s that recognition, because I think previously in my case, there was an attempt to suppress thought to try to get rid of thought because there is wanting to manufacture a certain experience of stillness or whatnot. And then it’s the recognition that, oh, shit, the stillness is always here, right? Regardless if there’s thought or not.

I think in both there is thought, because I think both are an interpretation of joy or sorrow when I’m struggling or suffering, when I feel like there is a thought which is traveling and the time where I’m reflecting on that is a little bit like a past reflection, in a way, in that I was suffering and that there was this thought which was tormenting me, which I believe is a thought by itself, packaged in the memory, and how I access it. And joy is no different whether the lack, whether I describe there was thought in the process of joy, when joy was happening, when I felt this moment, is a thought interpretation in itself, at least at the moment where I’m remembering it. In the moments where I’m totally present, So whether suffering or joy, I am not there in a way, I only reflect on the fact after the fact usually, or I remember it.

So it’s hard for me to say whether thought existed purely in that circumstance or there was something more. I do know and recognize for sure is when I’m reflecting back, it’s thought, like I’m languaging the joy or that circumstance, and I’m languaging the suffering or the pain or whatever, and I can blame the thought, and I cannot blame the thought for the joy. It’s like kind of that distinction. I don’t know, that’s at least what it sounds to me. And we use thinking a lot. We’ve used thinking and I think in this session so much. So if we’re not using it, what do we use? I feel like we’re using it as a bridge to interpret something, whether we understand it fully or not.

Really like we’re talking about thought thinking and here we’re all thinking and having thoughts about the thought and the thinking and where are they coming from?

I always think, because my thinking and analyzing is a byproduct that even in non duality, I always think that these two states, which we describe as two states, because that’s how we’re trying to understand them, there is trying to understand and there is what is, and I think we’re always in the trying of understanding. So I think it’s important, thinking is important, because we’re always in the state of trying to understand, like we’re never into either absolute state. I know we experience it and I know the knowing of it exists, but we’re in the trying to understand. And as a consequence, thoughts always are essential in that conversation.

And I don’t have a say in that, right? I cannot judge it. So that’s why I feel that it’s essential. And based on my experience just with hitting my head, I felt like if they don’t exist, something is wrong. All I know is that something was wrong and it wasn’t the same. I felt limited. I couldn’t articulate. I felt like something was seriously wrong. And that’s why I say it’s essential, it feels like it needs to exist, even though I don’t fully understand why. 

So what if thinking is just like breathing? It’s just a natural function of the human body-mind organism. And the story of thoughts needing to be transcended or the whole story about we need an empty mind to experience joy, I think I didn’t hear anyone here say that. But that’s one story that exists. That the less thinking there is, the better, so to speak. I’ve heard that story or that narrative. There’s a narrative which is quite popular in nondual circles, that thought is somehow extra and almost negative in connotation. You’re a better human being if you don’t have too many of them. I’m exaggerating. But sometimes it sounds like that’s the message. And maybe, there’s a narrative where thought both conscious, unconscious, helpful, unhelpful, all the different categories we’ve tried to create, are just what is. They’re just there as breathing is there or sense perceptions are there.

Thoughts are always in the now. If you have a thought as soon as you have the thought, you go into the past or into the future. You’re not in the now anymore. Like we are having a discussion with the group here. As soon as somebody says something, something happens in your mind, and you start thinking, and you’re not in the now anymore. Does it make sense? 

But isn’t the thought happening now? No, not exactly. As soon as you have the thought, you’re not in the now anymore. You have labeled it. You give it a name, symbol, word, language. But then where would you be if not in the now?  Exactly. In the now. 

Thoughts is one kind of tool like the other five senses, perhaps we have overused this tool. That is why we talk too much about thought and thinking and that is why it has become an issue. But otherwise it is as good a tool as listening, seeing, touching, because we use those in limited quantity because they are directly connected with our body, while thought is a more powerful tool, which can exist even without the body parts. So that is why it has been overused. And that is why it has become a problem. 

Hold that thought for next time.  It’s in the transcript. We’re over time and I want to stick to time. Thank you very much. We will continue next week and we’ll start all over again.