SWITCH (Talk 3): Working with Difficult Thoughts | Ignore/Selective Attention
Photo by Curated Lifestyle
Zazen is not a practice of emptying the mind of thoughts but of working with them skillfully and seeing them for what they are. Continuing to explore the Buddha’s instructions for engaging the mind from the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, Zuisei takes up the third of the five “SWITCH” tools: ignoring persistent and troublesome thoughts by simply not giving them attention. This doesn’t mean suppressing or bypassing what is difficult or painful to examine—if a thought needs to be looked at, it will keep coming back—but giving ourselves the space to see more, opening up a vista that reveals nothing less than an end to suffering.
This dharma talk on SWITCH, Part 3, was given by Zuisei Goddard. Scroll below for audio and transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
SWITCH (Talk 3):
Working with Difficult Thoughts | Ignore / Selective Attention
We have been exploring the Vittakasanthana Sutta (The Relaxation of Thoughts) as a series of teachings designed to help us work with difficult, distracting thoughts. It was written specifically for use during meditation, but it can also be applied to any moment in which we find ourselves grappling with challenging thoughts, activating thoughts, intrusive thoughts that lead to some kind of suffering. It’ll be easier to see these thoughts—thoughts of clinging, thoughts of aversion, thoughts of ignorance—during zazen, when our minds are a bit quieter and clearer. Then we can take these tools and apply them whenever we need. It’s important to stress that these tools are active—they require us to do something.
One of the most common misconceptions about meditation is that it’s about emptying the mind, that it’s about not thinking. Even experienced practitioners can believe for quite a while that thoughts are a problem—I know I did. I thought that good meditation was silent meditation, and that thoughts which interrupted that silence were bad, were a problem to be solved. But thoughts are not a problem at all. They’re the sense objects of thinking, just as sound is the sense object of hearing.
Thinking is what the mind does, it’s what it’s built for. Suffering appears, stress appears, anxiety and trouble appear when the relationship to our thoughts is problematic—when we believe our thoughts, when we imbue them with power and agency. They’re a problem when we don’t investigate them, and when they cause us to act in ways that cause harm.
Another thing to keep in mind: working with difficult thoughts means exactly what it says: it’s about working with these thoughts, not ignoring or suppressing them, not wishing them away, not pretending they’re not there or judging them for getting in the way of our quiet mind. Quiet and the equanimity that comes from it will appear as our mind settles, and our mind settles because this is also what mind does.
A focused, attentive mind, a concentrated mind naturally settles and brightens. A distracted mind will eventually settle too, but it takes longer. So, with these tools we’re helping it along. We’re working with our mind, not against it. This is important for all kinds of meditators to know, but it might be especially important for Zen practitioners, because we receive little instruction about how to manage more challenging thoughts. At the beginning of our practice we hear, let go of the thought or become it. That’s a true instruction. In one sense, it’s everything we need to know. It’s just that doing it isn’t always straightforward. What if I can’t let go of a thought? What if it’s more attractive than following the breath? What if no matter how often I let go, it comes back? What if I don’t know how to become it—how to close the gap between me and it without getting involved in its story?
Wise Cultivation of Attention
This sequence that the Buddha described on how to work with unskillful signs, says that when it comes to thoughts that cause me or others harm, I can apply one of the five skillful signs: I can switch one thought with another. I can warn myself of the danger of holding on to this thought. I can ignore it, which is really to not give it airtime. I can trace it back to its root. And I can chop it at the base before it has a chance to proliferate. We’ve covered switch and warn, and today we’re looking at ignore, which we can also think of as paying the thought no mind, paying no attention to it.
Just as a person with good eyes, not wanting to see forms that had come into range, would close their eyes or look away; in the same way, if unskillful thoughts still arise while they were studying the drawbacks of those thoughts, they should pay no mind and pay no attention to those thoughts.
This is like the instruction to lower your gaze during a silent retreat. To be able to stay focused and alert, during a meditation retreat you’re asked to not look around, to not read, to not feed your mind images other than the most necessary ones to move through your day—not because there’s anything wrong with looking, but because we’re trying to limit what we take in so that we can focus on what’s going on internally. This instruction to ignore the thought is exactly like that. It’s not suppression, it’s not avoidance. It is selective attention, a form of appropriate attention (yoniso manasikara). Because inappropriate attention, the Buddha says, causes us to get chewed by our thoughts. The image is turned on its head—instead of me nourishing myself with what I see, what I think, I get chewed up.
Our unexamined thoughts aren’t innocuous. If they were, there’d be no need to train the mind. As the previous sign showed us, there’s danger in feeding distracting or unskillful thoughts, because they proliferate like mushrooms and take over.
It’s like that passage in the Little Prince where he tells the narrator, you have to take care of the weeds, because if you don’t they’ll grow into baobabs and take over my little planet. In the illustrated version of the book, the tiny planet is completely covered by three huge baobabs growing in every direction and the Little Prince standing on top, hand shielding his eyes as her looks off into the distance. That’s our mind, completely overtaken by thoughts grown out of control.
I wrote recently that skeptical doubt, (vicikicha), is like mold. Let it grow unattended and before you know it, your house is rotting. So we have to attend to it.
Three Ways of Responding to Thought
I think we’re all clear that if we grab a stick and bash someone over the head, we’ll hurt them, and even more so if we keep hitting them. What’s not so obvious is the harm we’re causing ourselves with a harmful thought we repeat time and time again. “I’m not enough” is a form of aversion or self-hatred. It’s a milder form of saying, “I hate you” to ourselves. We’re absolutely going to cause harm if we keep doing this, so looking at the thought very carefully and warning ourselves of its danger is what will help us let it go. Before that, we switch the thought with a more skillful one: “I am perfect and complete just as I am.” We don’t get involved, we just replace it.
First you notice the difficult, the harmful thought: “I’m not enough,” and you switch it: “I’m perfect and complete.” But what if you don’t believe it, sometimes people ask me. What if I’m not convinced of what I’m saying? That’s okay, say it anyway. If you’ve been watering the seed of self-doubt for years in your mind, for decades, it’s going to take a little while for that seed to dry out and for the seed of confidence, of wholeness, to start to grow. It’s not going to happen in one sitting period. So you patiently water that new seed and let the first one wither away.
But if that doesn’t work, if the thought is persistent enough that switching it doesn’t budge it, then you warn yourself about the danger of following it. You study the drawbacks of keeping that thought going, being very clear and very honest with yourself. This method requires a bit more energy. The first is just like switching channels. With the second tool I have to talk to myself a bit. I have to get in there and grapple with the thought.
But if that doesn’t work, then I have to go to the next level. Remember that these signs are presented sequentially—each one requires a bit more energy to implement. In ignoring the thought, I have to actively remove my attention from it, cover the watering spout, as it were, so that harmful seed won’t keep growing, “Just like someone with good eyesight would cover their eyes or turn away so as not to see what they don’t want to see.”
I do this all the time when watching movies. They’ve become so violent that I frequently close my eyes and cover my ears during the graphic scenes. I don’t want to have those images in my mind stream. They don’t help me in any way, they don’t offer anything new. I’m not pretending that violence doesn’t exist, but I’m not exposing myself gratuitously to it either.
It’s true there are thoughts we shouldn’t ignore, shouldn’t turn away from. But that’s different from the kind of voyeurism that the media feasts on. We need to know when the thought we’re having is one we should look at or one we should ignore.
A thought like “I am not enough” could go either way. There’s a place for looking at it directly and asking, “What is this? Why is this here? Where did it come from? Am I sure?” There’s also a time to set this thought aside and simply not give it airtime so we can go deeper into our own mind. How can we tell? Practice. Trial and error. If you’re not sure, err on the side of dropping it. If it needs you to look at it, it’ll keep coming back. But not looking at it will give you the space you need to see more. What more? How these thoughts and the thinker are co-creating one another. This is an even more important reason for working with difficult thoughts.
On one level, they’re causing us harm and causing others harm, so working with them more skillfully is helpful. On a deeper level, these thoughts—and any thought, really—are doing something much more significant: they’re constantly recreating and reinforcing my sense of self, my sense of the one who’s having these thoughts and liking these thoughts and fighting these thoughts. That’s where the real trouble comes from.
Working with an angry thought by replacing it with a kind thought is like putting antibiotic ointment over a wound. Seeing how a thought gives birth to the person who’s thinking it is like pulling out the splinter that caused the wound in the first place.
Tracing the Moment a Thought Takes Shape
Let’s go back to the chain of dependent origination, so we can see how incredibly powerful our thoughts are, and why it’s so helpful to work with them more carefully. Those of you who are new to the teaching of dependent origination, don’t despair if it seems complicated. It is, but I’m going to go slowly, see if we can really see what’s going on.
Let’s take a simple, somewhat neutral thought, so we don’t get too wrapped up in its content. I’m sitting zazen, following my breath, when I hear an ambulance go by. That’s the moment of contact—the weeeuwweeeeuweeeeu of its siren perceived by the coming together of the sound, my ear, and ear consciousness (the part of my brain that makes sense of the sound).
Contact happens right in the middle of the chain of dependent origination, which says When this is, that comes to be. So, what needs to be there for me to hear the sound? My senses—in this case, my ear and my mind. When the siren is there, and the ear is there, and consciousness is working, there’s the sound of a siren.
What had to be there for the senses to be there? A body and a mind. A body made up of the elements of earth, fire, water, and air—according to Buddhism—and a mind that senses that siren sound as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither, that notices its characteristics (loud, high pitched), scans its mental file for previous examples of the sound and processes, through attention, the sound as “siren.” These are the five skandhas—form, sensation, conception, mental formations, and awareness.
But even without going into these in more detail, we can recognize that there’s a process by which our body and our mind come together to make sense of the sound of that siren. That’s what this link of name and form is pointing to. Without it, there’d be no senses and no way to make contact with the world.
The Buddha’s very carefully drawing a map of the process of perception. Without a body, and without a mind wired to it, how would we perceive anything?
We need to know when the thought we’re having is one we should look at or one we should ignore.
Let’s move forward down the chain from that point of contact, the moment of hearing the sound. (Before name and form there are three other links: consciousness, mental formations, and ignorance, but I’m not going to focus on these, since they refer to what happens in a previous life and they reappear in the five skandhas of clinging, anyway). If this sounds a bit repetitive it’s because it is; the links are not a linear chain but a series of loops and fractals.
Hearing the siren, what happens then? Feeling happens: I like this, I don’t like this, or I don’t care. Let’s say I don’t like it—an unpleasant feeling comes up with the sound, which leads to craving, the next link. I want the sound to go away, and wanting the sound to go away, clinging pops up. Craving wants, clinging grabs.
Craving is “Ugh! How awful!” Clinging is “Why does this always happen when I’m sitting? This street is so noisy. It’s such a pain!” And there it is: becoming! Then the birth of a self and the suffering that comes from it, which we can see as happening now or conditioning the next life. But note that at the point of contact, where sensation arises—the siren is pleasant, unpleasant, or neither—there’s no self. It is possible to experience the sound on its own terms, without it leading to the birth of me. It’s the moment I crave and then cling to the sensation that the self comes into being. It goes from being just sound, to me hearing the sound of a siren “and I don’t like it.” This is how the self is born, again, and again, and again—with every single contact we make. The process is immediate—everything arising everywhere, all at once. And at the center: Me!
Do you remember that movie, “Being John Malkovitch?” There’s a scene where he goes into a room and every person there is John Malkovitch. That’s exactly right—except it’s not just every person but also every chair, every table, every lamp, every fixture, every flower pot, every glass and cup and nail and thread and breath and thought and, and, and…. every single thing I see is made in my own image—if I’m not paying attention.
That’s why a thought isn’t just a thought. It’s a self-making machine, even good thoughts. It’s why they can and do lead to suffering—but they don’t have to. Ignoring a thought, forgetting a thought, is making space so we can see how this process happens, and so we can see that we have a choice. We can train ourselves to hear a sound just as sound, to see a form, just a form, and not immediately relate to it in terms of what it can or can’t do for me.
This is the reason there’s so much conflict in the world. We all want the things and the people of the world to serve us, to please us, to conform to our wishes, and they can’t possibly do that—not for one and not for nine billion and counting.
So what can we do? To start, we can train ourselves to perceive as the Buddha encouraged Bahiya: “In the seen only what is seen; in the heard only what is heard” When we are not with the sound or in the sound—the Buddha says—when the me is not there—then where is it? Where is the pain and the dislike that the siren causes me? Or that thing you said or the job I have or the thought I keep repeating. Where are they? “When you are not ‘in that,’ then, Bahiya, you will be neither here nor beyond nor in between the two. Just this is the end of suffering.”
Explore further
01 : SWITCH (Talk 1): Working with Difficult Thoughts with Zuisei Goddard
02 : Instructions on Not Giving Up (aka SWITCH) with Zuisei Goddard
03 : When No Thing Works | Buddhist Practice During Crisis with Zuisei Goddard
Working with Difficult Thoughts | Ignore/Selective Attention, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Video, audio, and transcript available.