SWITCH (Talk 4): Working with Difficult Thoughts | Tracing the Thought
Photo by Tegan Mierle
“Now, suppose that a person tries ignoring and forgetting harmful thoughts, but bad, unskillful thoughts connected with desire, hate, and delusion keep coming up. They should then focus on stopping the formation of those thoughts.” This is how the Buddha counsels us to work with the fourth skillful sign in theVittakasanthana Sutta (Relaxation of Thoughts).
In this fourth talk of the SWITCH series, Zuisei teaches us to work with persistent, troublesome thoughts by tracing them back to their roots, seeing that no matter how convincing, thoughts are inherently empty. They have no power other than the one we give them, and by carefully examining them, we can take that power back for ourselves.
This dharma talk on SWITCH, Part 4, was given by Zuisei Goddard. Scroll below for video, audio, and transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
SWITCH (Talk 4):
Working with Difficult Thoughts | Trace
Tonight we are tracing our thoughts back to their roots, the fourth skillful sign in the Buddha’s Vittakasanthana Sutta (The Relaxation of Thoughts). But before we do that, I want to clarify something I said earlier. I mentioned that this series is designed to be used during meditation, and that we can also use it any time we are facing a less-than-skillful thought. Our partner says something, or our child, or our boss, and we get triggered. Before we start getting entangled in a bramble of thoughts, we can apply one of these signs and switch gears. We can interrupt the momentum of the story and turn to something that will help us respond in a way that will benefit us and the other person. This is true, but there’s a subtlety here.
Someone asked me, if someone says something and I notice myself getting angry, isn’t switching or ignoring the thought a form of avoidance? I understand that ultimately there’s no one to become angry, but in that moment I’m angry! The anger is real and it’s affecting me, so I don’t want to just ignore it. So we have to be very clear about what this teaching is saying, because maybe we hear, Switch the thought, Ignore the thought, Chop the thought at its root, but we really hear, That thought isn’t important. That thought is not worth your attention or your energy, and if you get angry, that’s not important either, since feelings are empty and you’re supposed to let go. That’s not what this teaching is saying.
Validity of Thoughts, Emotions, Sensations
These five signs are in no way negating the validity of our thoughts, our emotions, or our sensations—if we’re in pain, for example. What they are doing is getting us to cut through the content of the thought to see what’s on the other side. And what is that? The realization that when the thought disappears, the thinker disappears. That neither thought nor thinker, or feeling and feeler, are as fixed and as immovable as I often take them to be, but that doesn’t mean that what you feel or think isn’t real. It means that I and that thought or that feeling and you and your thought or feeling don’t exist independently. It’s not just, “The self isn’t real and therefore shouldn’t be hurt or offended.” It’s that this self can’t be what it is apart from everything else. The thought and the thinker are both conditioned, they are interdependent, they are mutually arising. When this is, that comes to be. When this is not, that does not arise. Which means thought has no power other than the one I give it.
I know I’m repeating myself, but I want to make very clear that thoughts are not a problem, and neither are feelings. At the level of conventional truth, we face the thought, we acknowledge that we have it, or we acknowledge our feeling, and we do whatever we need to do to respond to it well. Maybe that means going to therapy with your partner so you can work through the dynamics that get in the way of a more harmonious relationship or maybe it means quitting your job because your boss is intractable and staying in that environment would be toxic for you. Then, at the level of ultimate truth, we see there’s no thought and no thinker apart from one another which, if it’s really understood, gives us a whole new perspective on thoughts and on ourselves. That’s the whole point, in the end—to see into the unconditioned. To see that which does not change with our moods, with our likes and dislikes, with what another person says or doesn’t say about us. The point is to be completely free to pick up a thought or to put it down, depending on what is needed. Otherwise we’re just managing our thoughts, instead of being free of the energy that binds us—the energy of greed, anger, and delusion.
The sutra isn’t saying if your partner says something and you get hurt, let go of that hurt because it’s empty. It’s saying when you get triggered and thoughts of desire, aversion, or ignorance arise, here are a few things you can do to let them go and not make things worse. The teaching on emptiness never negates what you’re going through. It simply gives you another way of looking at it, and many different ways to respond that maybe you didn’t consider before.
The Energy of Thought
Let’s get into the fourth sign—to trace thoughts back to their roots.
Now, suppose that a person is ignoring and forgetting about those thoughts, but bad, unskillful thoughts connected with desire, hate, and delusion keep coming up. They should focus on stopping the formation of those thoughts.
This translation is by Bhante Sujato, an Australian monk and teacher who was ordained in the Thai Buddhist tradition and now considers himself an Early Buddhist. He has an interesting story. He heads a website called Sutta Central that is dedicated to providing access to the Early Buddhist texts in the original, and in modern translations. When he cofounded the site, he couldn’t get digital translations of the Pali Canon without copyright, so he decided to do them himself. He moved to Chimei, an island off the coast of Taiwan, and lived there for three years translating the four major collections of the Pali Canon, the nikayas. A monumental job. He’s also very involved in the issue of bikkhuni ordination and an outspoken critic of the top-down hierarchies of many Buddhist institutions. “They’re dead weight,” he says. “Get rid of them and Buddhism will be much better off.” A very dynamic teacher, and his translations of the suttas are a bit more accessible so I thought it’d be good to use them—also because they contain some very helpful notes.
If we look at that last sentence I quoted: They should focus on stopping the formation of those thoughts, which I’m calling “tracing them back to their roots.” Another translation says “stilling the thought formation.” This sentence is what gives the sutra its title, The Relaxation of Thoughts, which Bhante Sujato translated as How To Stop Thinking. I don’t love this translation for reasons I’ve already given. Relax into the thought and you’re much better able to get a handle on it, and to work with it differently than you might have if you’re caught. “Thought formation” is a “mental formation,” which you’ll recall from our study of the skandhas and of dependent origination—samskara. Here, it refers to the energy that drives the formation of our thoughts, so when we understand that energy, we take away its power.
Anger has energy, greed has energy, but so does mindfulness, so does concentration—and these are also samskara. Remember that when you’re able to successfully apply one of these signs, your mind “settles, unifies, and becomes immersed in samadhi (concentration).” It’s like this whole sutra is filling out that pithy instruction we give for zazen: see the thought, let it go, and come back to your breath. Between seeing and letting go of a thought, there’s a whole universe. The sutra is spelling out how to let go.
Tracing the Energy to Its Root
In this sign, after trying to switch and warn ourselves of the danger and ignoring or removing our attention from the thought, now we’re taking it and tracing it back to its root, and in doing so, “those bad thoughts are given up and come to an end,” Bhante Sujato says. But what’s the root of a thought? What is its source?
Suppose there was a person walking quickly. They’d think: Why am I walking so quickly? Why don’t I slow down? So they’d slow down. They’d think: Why am I walking slowly? Why don’t I stand still? So they’d stand still. They’d think: Why am I standing still? Why don’t I sit down? So they’d sit down. They’d think: Why am I sitting? Why don’t I lie down? So they’d lie down. And so that person would shun successively coarser postures and adopt more subtle ones.
See what’s happening here? A person “walking quickly” is like someone swamped by thoughts. They’re swirling around and around in your head, moving faster than you can track them. But, we don’t have to deal with all of them at once. We don’t have to try to stop them, which would be like stopping a dam from overflowing. All we have to do is notice we’re swamped. Wait, I’m walking so fast. Why? Why don’t I walk slowly? Why don’t I stand, then sit, then lie down, gradually quieting down my body? Just so with my mind: I’m thinking so much, why don’t I look at these thoughts? Why don’t I slow down even more and look at a single thought? Why don’t I look at what’s behind this thought? Where did it come from? I don’t mean psychologically. It’s not, “When I was little my mother didn’t pay attention to me so now I’m anxious whenever someone doesn’t answer me right away.” No, this means looking behind the thought, as it were, to see where it comes from. What is its source? What is its root? Where does it come from when it appears? Where does it go when it goes?
Between seeing and letting go of a thought,
there’s a whole universe.
In that moment, we’ve already slowed down, instead of rushing on to the next thought, until we get to the place of no thought, where it loses its power. The energy behind the thought, which is what gets us tangled, dissipates, and then we can see a thought for what it is: something constructed, something made. I can choose not to make it, at least for a little while, so that I can focus on the work at hand, the work of liberation.
One of the things that’s also happening as we work with these signs is that we’re moving through time in our minds. We do a bit of traveling as we pick up each of these tools, and that’s part of the power of these signs. It’s like we’re enlisting past and present and future to help us get out of a tight spot. When we switch a bad thought—I’m going to use Bhante Sujato’s language. When we switch a bad thought with a good one, we’re moving horizontally in time. We’re on the train and the moment we see the railroad switch, we pull the lever and switch over to another track. It’s parallel travel.
But when we warn ourselves of the danger of bad thoughts, we’re traveling forward in time. We’re anticipating the harm that will come if we keep going along this road. We’re looking at Waze and we see there’s a pile-up ahead and we think, Nope, and in that way encourage ourselves to get off at the next exit. Which is an incredible quality of the human mind, come to think of it. Quite extraordinary. I can see where I’m going based on where I’ve been, and decide to go elsewhere.
When I was reading An Immense World, the book by Ed Yong on animal perception, I came upon a passage that just blew my mind (I mentioned it before, but didn’t explain it well, so here it is again). He was explaining that when animals move—including us—our sense organs offer two kinds of information: There’s exafference, signals produced by stuff happening out in the world, and reafference, the signals produced by my own actions. If one of you moves and I see that movement, that’s exafference; it’s other produced. But to see you, I moved my eyes slightly to the right, and this sent patterns of light across my retinas. That’s reafference or a self-produced signal. How do I know the difference between the two? How do I know whether you moved or my eyes moved? The Buddhist answer is that you don’t—there’s simply movement. It all moves, at once. The physiological answer is incredible
If I understand this correctly, when I decide to move, my nervous system sends neural signals telling my muscles what to do: “Move your eyes to the right,” but on the way from brain to muscle, that command is duplicated. The copy then heads to my senses and it simulates the consequences of the movement I plan to make. In other words, my eyes know what I’ll see before I see it. How? Nobody fully understands. Then, when the movement actually happens, my eyes have already predicted the self-produced signals I’m about to experience. So I compare the prediction against reality, and recognize my own signals, then prepare myself to see what I’m about to see. And all of this happens unconsciously. Philosophers have speculated that this process involves the will, or the soul. I say it sounds suspiciously like samskara, volitional formations
One commenter called this fourth sign the process of “reconstructing” the train of thought, where you trace the ever more subtle kinds of energy behind the thought until you get to no energy. If I’m feeling snippy about someone, if I’m feeling unkind toward them, I can ask myself what’s behind this energy of ill will. Because every thought is conditioned by another thought, so we can trace the chain back to its beginning in this way. Maybe I notice that I’m feeling unkind toward another because I’m envious. And when I look at that envy, I see that behind it is fear, is insecurity or a sense of inadequacy. Inadequacy, in turn, rests on my belief in the “I” as a solid, independent self, someone I need to protect, someone who needs to be better than someone else. When I see that this conceit is empty—that the I is empty of self nature—then naturally, the mind comes to rest.
Making Space for a World We Want to Live In
Clearly, this takes more energy than the previous signs. You have to have the time and the willingness to get in there, and patiently trace the thought back to its root. That’s why this series is best used during any period of meditation, certainly, but particularly during longer retreats, when you have the time and the space and hopefully the inclination to corral your wild and wily mind. To tame it a little so you can look at it more closely.
When we don’t do this, we get dragged around by our thoughts and can do very little about it. The teaching on the eight worldly winds comes out of such a mind, which is dragged this way and that by gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame, and pleasure and pain. Such a mind has nothing to anchor it, so whenever someone does something you don’t like, there you go, getting angry. Whenever they say something you like, you rush to get close and hold on. It’s exhausting—and unnecessary. If you’re tending a garden, you don’t let it get all choked up with weeds. When you see a weed, you pull it, and this gives space for the plants you want to be there to grow. But doesn’t this sound like discrimination? Plants are good, weeds are bad.
Well, though on one level every thought is made equal, on another level there are thoughts that help, and thoughts that harm. We’re making room for the first, because those are the ones that will build the kind of world we actually want to live in. It’s not someone else’s job. It’s up to each one of us. The good thing, is that we can. We can.
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 | Tracing the Root of a Thought a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Video, audio, and transcript available.