Cum am învăţat să nu gândesc: 19 apr. 2010

Alive Silence - How to not think!

Balancing thought with silence

How to halt the inner dialogue? How to stop thinking? When our train of thought is moving at full speed, it can seem almost impossible. But this is just how it seems, in actual fact it can be achieved relatively easily. It's not a big deal. Like learning how to ride a bicycle, it is not all that difficult, although you do need to go through a process of learning, of trying and practicing. You can't just mount a bicycle for the first time in your life and expect to ride it without a learning period. Conscious silence is something you will need to learn by trial and error, you will need to 'get the hang of it'. It is a knack. Excessive thinking is a habit. To kick the habit requires a certain discipline, we have to remind ourselves not to automatically revert to thinking all the time. But like riding a bicycle, to stop thinking is not incredibly difficult.

The idea is not that you never think again, the idea is simply to balance thought with silence, to put thinking in perspective, and to make it a voluntary process. The dimension of conscious silence is inestimably valuable, and you can bring it back into your life.
Discovering silence

Your chances of discovering this inner silence serendipitously, are slim. You could get a taste of it when your hand unexpectedly gets caught in a lawn mower or something. You are jolted into silence, and your whole thought process gets interrupted for a few moments. Or you may have a glimpse of it when you jump out of a plane for the first time. Or when you jump out for the 31st time, but now your chute fails to open. In these extreme situations your mind might go into spontaneous silence, a silence in which you are acutely aware. Your inner dialogue can come to a halt because of radical circumstance. And in a way it's a thrill. This silence in your brain, this acute awareness, is so refreshing, replenishing.

There are other, maybe less spectacular situations in which we may experience this silence spontaneously. Imagine entering a room where, unbeknownst to you, someone you love dearly is sleeping. There is another person present who indicates, in the most friendly manner, for you to hush. You immediately understand the situation, and immediately you are quiet. Right then and there you stop talking, you don't utter a single word more, and even inside you become very quiet. For a few moments you stop thinking, and you become very attentive.
Meditation

You can learn this attentive silence. This state of attentive silence is the true meaning of the word 'meditation'. Meditation has become a confusing word, these days almost everything is called meditation. Meditation even means contemplation, standing on your head, repeating words over and over, breathing exercises, you name it. Meditation is none of that, meditation is simply conscious silence, the state of silence in your brain while you are wide awake. You are fully conscious, but not thinking. In order to have this silence in your brain, you do not need to sit in complicated postures, nor is it necessary to go to a monastery in Tibet.

Meditation is not some exercise. It is not a technique to be practiced. It is not a concentrated effort. Concentration would make meditation an achievement of the mind, when in fact it is the mind going into abeyance, shutting down.

Don't try to stop your thinking, but learn not to think in the first place. To try to stop your thinking is repressing thoughts, it is not authentic silence. To try to silence your mind is a reactive approach. The proactive approach is to not think your next thoughts. The result is that you've stopped thinking, not because you stopped your thinking, but because you didn't continue it. Meditation is much more innocent and much more straightforward than is generally believed.

Understanding meditation simply as conscious silence, there's no need to create a dichotomy between daily life and spirituality. You can prepare a meal or do the dishes with silence in your brain. You can have a silent mind listening to someone, or walking down the street, taking a shower, having a drink. You can be in inner silence in so many situations: during your golf game, in a loud discotheque, while making love, in a deep, and intimate embrace. Having silence in your brain does not mean that you go blind or stupid, you are perfectly able to do all sorts of things, and actually with more awareness, with more presence. You are present-minded, not absent-minded, not lost in thoughts.
How to literally not think

So how to not think? We need to consider the thought process. We need to have a better idea of how it works. The thought process is like a train, a steam-train of thought. In order for the train to move, we have to burn pieces of wood in the engine: we have to provide the brain with thoughts. One log feeds on the previous, and this is how we get the train moving. So we keep feeding these logs into the train's engine in order for the train to get moving and gather momentum. One thought feeds on the previous, the momentum builds, and our train of thought gets moving.

This is a train without brakes though, and if we want to stop it, the only way is to let it run out of steam. Of course, if we keep feeding new logs into the engine, the train will never run out of steam.

Some people - in an effort to quickly stop the train - will try to get logs out of the engine! They use new logs to try to get the ones burning out. Unfortunately, the results are always counterproductive. They never succeed in getting logs out of the engine. Instead, the logs they were trying to get them out with catch fire! In a more frantic effort to stop the train they use new logs to get the ones that just caught fire back out, but the same thing happens, and the train keeps moving at full speed. In fact, the more frantic the effort to stop the train by trying to get logs out of the engine, the more wood is burned, and the more momentum the train gathers.

In order to stop the train you don't want to meddle with logs already in the engine. Let them burn out, they burn themselves out in little time. Once you think a thought, let it burn itself out, because trying to undo this thought is a futile effort. In trying to undo it, you only think more thoughts. The single discipline needed to stop the train, is to not put new logs into the engine. You have been feeding logs into the engine so regularly, so automatically, that you may find yourself feeding logs into it again, just out of habit.

Remember, stop feeding new logs, and don't meddle with logs already in the fire. Don't bring in new thoughts, and don't meddle with thoughts that you are already thinking. If thoughts continue for a while, it is just the momentum of a train of thought moving at full speed that needs to come to a halt. You just take care not to fuel the train while you are waiting for it to run out of momentum and stop. You just take care not to put yet another log into the fire, and soon your train of thought will run out of steam. To meditate simply means to not think, to not continue throwing thoughts into the engine of your steamtrain of thought. Don't bother about thoughts that you are already thinking, just be alert to not think your next thought. This is the whole secret of meditation.

The 7 Principles of Freedom by Timothy Schoorel
The basics of freedom

This book explains the basics of psychological and absolute freedom. These basics are your chance for liberation.
Discover:
The power of natural principles
The keys to psychological freedom
The meaning of absolute freedom
The possibility of a new humanity
Natural principles

In your hands or on the screen you have a book that could change and even transform your life! It depends on you. It is between you and you. The book describes - in a no-nonsense way - the basic principles of freedom. The deeper you recognize these principles in your life, the more boundless your freedom.

The structure of the book has been modeled on Stephen Covey's brilliant book: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In it, he explains beautifully the whole subject of principles and paradigms. Though the book you are reading now discusses freedom and Mr. Covey's book addresses human effectiveness, you may find some overlap since both books use the idea of natural principles and of paradigm-shifts.
This book is divided into four parts:
Part one: Principles and Paradigms
Part two: Psychological Freedom - Principles 1 to 3: Clarity, Unicity and Innocence
Part three: Absolute Freedom - Principles 4 to 6: Consciousness, Alive Silence and Truth
Part four: A New Humanity - Principle 7: Spontaneity

The 7 Principles of Freedom

Clarity: Answers are not the answer..

Unicity: Nothing to separate us.

Innocence: Inresponsibility, not Irresponsibility.

Consciousness: Beyond the Human-paradigm.

Alive Silence: Silence in your brain!

Truth: The Absolute.

Spontaneity: Being Natural.

The 7 Paradigm-Shifts

From Information to Understanding.

From Separation to Unicity.

From Guilt to Voluntary Responsibility.

From The Human Being to Consciousness.

From Thought to Conscious Silence.

From Time to Timelessness.

From Control to Spontaneity.

Without breathing

Basic to the understanding of this book is the concept of natural, true principles. Principles are natural, we have an inborn feeling for them. We are all extremely familiar with principles and we rely on them. A principle is an 'obvious' truth, it is self-evident. We know that without breathing we won't live very long, we know that the sun rises in what we call the east, we are very familiar with a force that we later came to understand as gravity. We know the significance of friendship. We know it, and never seriously doubt it.

We know principles experientially, we don't merely believe in them. They are not ideas in our mind. Principles are not dependent on our culture, on what we happen to believe in this culture at this moment in time. These things have been known to be true throughout cultures. They are more basic than our mental makeup and what we believe about life. Principles somehow precede our cultural ideas and beliefs. They bypass our opinions and belief-systems completely. Principles are truths, and basically undeniable.
Pulling Rank

In his terrific book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey enlightens us on the nature of principles by recounting a story about a battleship caught in a storm. It's a true to life story that first appeared in Proceedings, the magazine of the Naval Institute. The story is by Frank Koch.

Two battle ships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities.

Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, "Light, bearing on the starboard bow."

"Is it steady or moving astern?" the captain called out.

Lookout replied, "Steady, captain," which meant we were on a dangerous collision course with that ship.

The captain then called to the signalman, "Signal that ship: We are on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees."

Back came a signal, "Advisable for you to change 20 degrees."

The captain said, "Send, I'm a captain, change course 20 degrees."

"I'm a seaman second class," came the reply. "You had better change course 20 degrees."

By that time the captain was furious. He spat out, "Send, I'm a battleship. Change course 20 degrees."

Back came the flashing light, "I'm a lighthouse."

We changed course.
Rock-solid

Like lighthouses, principles stand rock-solid, and they can guide us. In this rapidly changing world, where it seems there are not many things we can solidly rely on, principles are ageless and foundational. They have a guidingproperty: like the evening star that sailors could rely on to show them the way.

Various principles are valid in different areas of life. If we want healthy relationships, the principles of honesty and friendship hold true. The best marriages are based on friendship. It was Nietzsche who observed: "It is not lack of love but lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."

If we want a healthy and long-term business, the principle of adding value holds true. The idea is not to try and make a lot of money but to try and add a lot of value! Provide a service, make customers very happy, truly satisfy them, and money comes as a consequence of that. And running our business on the principle of adding value, we don't need to be falsely modest either. There's nothing wrong in becoming rich if it means that we've been able to give something of good value to a lot of people. The primary focus is to add value, not to make money, that's the principle.

For our physical well-being, we need some form of exercise, or the body becomes weaker and weaker and we get hopelessly out of shape. The principle is exercise.
Principles are not beliefs

Three centuries ago Galileo Galilei proclaimed that it was the earth that turned around the sun and not vice versa as was previously believed. You wouldn't make a big deal out of it now, but it was a big deal then! In what was later called the Galileitrial, Mr. Galilei was eventually summoned by the pope to publicly denounce his words. He responded: "I will revoke my statement, but I don't think either the sun or the earth will mind much."

Principles are not beliefs that need to be defended or supported. Natural principles have their way irrespective of our beliefs and opinions. It sometimes seems that we all live in a different reality, because of our different views on life. And though it's true that our beliefs about life color our experiences, reality itself is independent of our views and beliefs. Reality exists before we begin to form beliefs and opinions about it. Whatever our belief-system, sooner or later that bubble will burst, and we are forced to a reality-check. Of course we can look into life voluntarily too. When we do, natural principles are what we find.
Hierarchy of principles

There is a hierarchy of principles: for our physical survival, oxygen is the first and most fundamental principle. Water, food, warmth and hygiene are fundamental principles for our physical existence, but they are not the most fundamental principle for physical survival. Oxygen is the very life-blood of our cells, we can not live without it for more than three, four minutes. In the game of tennis, technique comes first. Before being able to play a tactical game you must have some technique to hit the ball back in the first place. In order for a plant to grow, it needs water and sunlight. Without water and sunlight it won't grow, no matter how big the flowerpot. Certain principles are more fundamental than others, and some are the most fundamental: the first principles.
Natural truths

To understand these principles, you can look into them yourself. Exercising your direct perception, looking into them with honest intelligence, natural principles become unavoidable, unquestionable. It becomes absurd to doubt or to question them any further. True principles, once we are aware of them, are amazingly obvious.

What are principles? Principles are natural laws, or natural truths. The sun rises in the east, it never rises in the west. You can look west all day and convince yourself that that's where the sun will rise, but you're just fooling yourself. People have their own ideas about what is true or truth. Yet truth, by its very nature, is not dependent on what we think of it. That's what makes it truth: it is true irrespective of what we believe about it! Our opinions, for or against, are irrelevant. True principles are beyond opinions, yours or mine.

When we understand natural laws or principles and live life accordingly, it's like swimming downstream. When we water the garden, flowers bloom! If we neglect the garden, the seeds may never sprout. Water is the life of the garden, it is its first principle, without it there would be no garden. Water is a natural law, it is a natural principle. It needs no arguments in its favor, it simply cannot truly be denied.

luni, 19 aprilie 2010

Old timers cartoons!

How to not think --- Users manual!