Okay, so, thoughts are the problem. There’s no question about that. Thoughts are your jailer, but I want to make this as simple as I can. What gives thoughts their energy is your emotional attachment to them. So the practice during meditation is not to try to stop thinking. That’s impossible, at least directly. The practice during meditation is to lose your emotional attachment to thoughts. Then the mind as a whole begins to quiet, and then thoughts dissolve into “flowers.”
The mythological temptations of the Buddha are metaphorical for the psychological temptations of your thoughts to move you emotionally.
So here’s the practice: You’ve got your mantra, you breathe in, you breathe out, and now here comes a thought. What do you do? You don’t try to make it go away. That’s fighting. That’s giving the thought even more energy, and causing the mind to be even more turbulent.
You accept it emotionally. You face it, you don’t run from the thought. And you accept it. You don’t try to fight the thought. And then little by little, as you let go emotionally, you’ll notice a great peace come over you, and you’ll notice the thoughts don’t have control over you anymore. It almost becomes a game really. Okay mind, what are you going to tempt me with next? Something sexy? Something fearful or sad? Or guilt? Bring it on! And the mind is trying to throw you off the balance beam (ie, stop you from meditating) and it becomes fun to see how far you can go without it ‘knocking you down.’
And they (thoughts) begin to dissolve. Transcendence comes through.
My own insight happened while I was meditating last week: It was the insight that you’re not trying to get rid of your thoughts, or stop thinking, but rather stop the attachment to the thought. Don’t let it move you emotionally. That way the thought can come and go without you emotionally reacting to it. Think of the mythology of the Buddha: His victory came not from directly getting rid of thoughts, but by not being moved by them. Remember the story? First he was tempted by desire in the form of Lord Kama’s (a metaphor for Ego, Super-Ego, or even thought itself) beautiful, naked daughters (I believe there were three, which is an important mythological number) and he didn’t allow himself to be moved. So then, Lord Kama tried to use fear: He sent armies and weapons hurling at him. Again, the Buddha wasn’t moved, so the arrows dissolved into flowers.
Ah, but I almost forgot, there were three temptations, right? What was the third? It was the temptation of “Dharma” or in our lingo, what you should be doing out in the world. You might call it a “Political” temptation or a “Career” temptation. In the Buddha’s case, he was a King’s son. So, the temptation was political. The Lord Kama said, in effect, “What are you doing just sitting here? Can’t you see the world’s going to hell in a hand basket? You’re a prince. You should be leading your people!”
And still the Buddha did not allow himself to be moved. And that’s the moment he attained complete victory.
I just bought a book on Kindle called “Why Meditate?” and while I’ve just read the first 10 or so pages, he already confirmed my first insight: That you’re not trying to stop or get rid of your thoughts. At least not directly. Anymore than the Buddha tried to directly get rid of The Lord Kama. Instead, he wasn’t moved emotionally by the temptations of desire, fear, or duty. And that’s a good metaphor for what you’re trying to do in meditation: as the thoughts arise, you don’t try to fight them, but instead, lose your emotional attachment to them. Practice not letting them emotionally move you. So in that sense you really need thoughts during meditation, just like a marksman needs a target. You need them, so that you can practice not letting them control you psychologically or emotionally.
Here’s another good example. If you go to the 2:48 mark of this video, you’ll hear Deepak address this very issue:
“See, trying to silence a thought, is a thought. Ok? So, don’t try to silence the thought. But, you see, if you leave them alone, they start to say to themselves, ‘Nobody’s noticing me.’ Ok, so you don’t try to get out of the thought, because that is a thought by itself…The awareness of a thought is not a thought. It cannot be, right? So, just be aware of it. That’s all. Don’t try to [silence it].” – Deepak Chopra
I might rephrase it like this: “Trying to silence a thought, is an emotion. If you leave them alone, emotionally, they’ll leave the ‘party’ on their own volition. So, don’t try to get out of the thought, because, that, in itself, is an emotion. Instead, try to lose your emotional attachment to the thought.”
Play and practice with this idea. As the thoughts arise, practice not being emotionally moved by them.
Something’s going on that wants to be known, a presence.
It wants you to make your connection.
What do you think is really underneath the veil?
Something very deep.
Deeper than history, deeper than tomorrow, deeper than now.
That’s the secret, secret, secret voice
that never comes out during the day.
I’m with you: I don’t want it to ever go away.
“Connect your iPhone to iTunes, go to the Music tab and uncheck Sync Music and press Apply to resync.” – from “Randers4 on the Apple Support Forums. (This worked for me and took only a couple minutes, even with 2000 songs, to complete).
Man, iTunes is just crazy, and drives me crazy. But anyway, the reason I needed to do this: My old iPhone 4 was filled up to where I couldn’t update anything, and in this age of Spotify, I’m not listening to any of the music on my phone’s library. Now my photos and videos are taking up as much space, but my trust in iPhoto is just as weak, so I’m afraid to delete all photos at once, because I’m just sure there’ll be some in there that I have only one copy of. Ugh!
At first when I googled it said to “Uncheck” the unwanted songs and then Re-Sync. But you have to do that one by one! I’m not going to sit there and uncheck 2000 songs! Well actually I started to, and then realized the insanity and futility. Then something weird happened. I Googled some more to see if there was a way to Uncheck all the songs at once. One guy said to, within iTunes, click Edit>Select All, as if that was a way to mass uncheck all the songs. But that didn’t work. It scared me because, after I did that, and again started “re-unchecking” songs, the songs would disappear as I unchecked them. I thought, “OMG, am I deleting them from my computer or phone or both!?!?!?!?!”
Turns out, luckily, I wasn’t. For whatever reason the “Unchecked” songs, as I unchecked them were being moved to the bottom of the page, automatically. Phew! But still crazy. Now, I just went back and clicked Edit>Select All, clicked around the left side of the iTunes window, to the left of the check boxes, and the display seems returned to normal, with the Unchecked and Checked songs together in their normal order.
He simply states: “Connect your iPhone to iTunes, go to the Music tab and uncheck Sync Music and press Apply to resync.”
Boom! And that was it. Did the trick. They were all deleted in seconds, and I freed up space to do my iOS update as well as app updates.
Now, as to how to go in there and selectively add back songs, perhaps things I can’t get on Spotify, or for when I’m out of connectivity range, I don’t know what the best practice is. I saw somewhere that using Playlists was the best way, you add the things you want on the phone to a certain playlist, and when you connect your phone there’s an option to only Sync certain “selected” playlists.
But I’m not worried about that now. I just wanted to free up space so that I could update. And I really appreciate Randers4 plain English, one sentence response. Why can’t Apple explain things so that a human being can understand? I mean, do you know if you go into “Help” within iTunes that there is utterly no topic on deleting songs from your phone? The craziness stupefies me.
The labyrinth in which the hero soul has become lost. That’s the place from which we are all starting. Did the ego build this labyrinth? Or is the labyrinth a metaphor for the ego itself? Those are interesting questions, but they aren’t nearly as interesting, practically speaking, as what the Wax String of Theseus stands for. The wax string is a metaphor for the thing that got the hero, Theseus, out of the labyrinth. Some qualities strike me about it:
It’s very smallness, thinness, almost invisible quality represents the fact that it is something representative of the spirit, soul, the psychology. It’s easily lost, like a feeling, but if held onto can lead you out.
That same narrowness represents single-mindedness of purpose, and an unbending intent. It also represents a psychological commitment. So that nothing distracts from it. It’s very narrow but very long, meaning that, commitment, ironically, leads to freedom, adventure, and, in short, the way out of misery.
Update: 03/11/15:
I’ve been reading a lot of Grimm’s Fairy-Tales in the last few weeks. This kind of material really feeds my soul, makes me happy. But I’ve only been “allowing” myself one or two stories a day. It strikes me that when you find something that really awakens your passion, why compartmentalize or limit yourself to it for one hour a day? My sense of this and similar experiences, is that, like the Wax String, you should hold on to them, not let them go, stay with them, all day and all night, at least until they lead you “out” of the Labyrinth. That’s my sense of “The Hero’s Adventure” and more specifically the metaphorical, or one possible metaphortical meaning of this element in this particular story.
“In the end these things matter most: How well did you love?
How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go?”
~ Gautama Buddha
I saw this on Facebook tonight. There was a page called Buddhism. The Part that got me was “How deeply did you let go?” I feel that’s truly such a crucial part of this “Curing Yourself from the Ego” series that I’m trying to write, or more importantly trying to do! I’ve written the last couple of days about cultivating a mood of “Surrender.” Well, letting go, and surrender feel a whole lot alike. Acceptance, letting go, surrender. That’s the sense of it. My problem the last few days, or perhaps all my life, is that I seem to “get” this in the evening, at night, and just before sleep. But the daytime seems to slam the door on such notions. It seems to demand that I ‘do’ something ‘practical’ and forget about all this ‘mumbo-jumbo.’ All sense of mystery, spirit, poetry, adventure, fairy-tales, mythology, that seems to naturally rise during the evening, like the fog off a lake in the morning, seems to all disappear when daytime comes. It’s like living two different realities, or at the least two different moods, and more devastatingly, two opposite moods. I don’t know what to do about it really. Reading Joseph Campbell’s “Creative Mythology” he mentions quite a few times that this is a common theme throughout history, this tension between day and night, the Moon and Sun, and this pull in the soul between the desire for spiritual things on the one hand, and success out there in the world on the other. I have about 50 pages left. I hope to find an answer in there before I’ve finished.
Meditation seems to be about letting go. This evening after a really peaceful walk with Aspen, I came up the deck, and instead of just going inside to watch TV, I decided (or felt like) to meditate out there on the cushioned chaise lounge. It felt right. It was calling. Something was calling. And when I began to meditate, I knew that was the trick, “let go of those thoughts.” It’s not that you get mad for having them. I mean they just pour out of your brain, like water out of a fountain, one after the other, seemingly ever millesecond. It occurred to me, that the trick was not to get to a state where you have no thoughts, but to let them come, and then let them go. Don’t hold on to them. That seems to be the temptation. You want to hold on to the thoughts, especially the ones that trigger emotion because it feels like that is your life, and you have to get back in there and play the movie over and over again. But then when you practice letting the thoughts go, you start to notice them as just thoughts, you start to have a psychological feeling of standing back from them, and they start to lose their power over you. That’s liberation!
I felt like I could have gone on for hours like that, but the mosquitoes started to bite. So I came in. But I did feel like an answer of sorts was presenting itself in that moment. Maybe it’s something I can hang on to and develop further into a solid solution. There’s still many things I’m holding on to, deeply, that I know I need to deeply let go of. That’s the mantra: Let Go. These attachments are not your life. These attachments are what is blocking out your life.
“The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.” ~ Atisha