SWITCH: Working with Difficult Thoughts
Photo by Joshua Earle
What gets in the way of seeing clearly? Inevitably, it’s our own thoughts—thoughts of greed, anger, and delusion—that take us out of the reality of the moment and pull us away from our lives and our practice.
Drawing on the Vitakkasanthana Sutta (“The Relaxation of Thoughts”), Zuisei presents five practical tools for working with distracting or troubling thoughts, both on the cushion and in our daily lives, organized under the acronym SWITCH. She also makes it clear that learning to master the mind is not a matter of control, but of working skillfully with our thoughts so we can clear the way for growing clarity and wisdom.
This dharma talk on SWITCH: Working with Difficult Thoughts was given by Zuisei Goddard. Scroll below for audio, video, and transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
SWITCH:
Working with Difficult Thoughts
Tonight I want to speak of the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, the sutra of the “Relaxation of Distracting Thoughts." I’ve touched on it in the past, but I want to go a bit deeper into it here, because of its importance for our zazen and for our lives in general, particularly on the heels of speaking about concentration as one of the links on the chain of transcendental dependent origination, and also because some of you have asked recently, What is stopping me?
Really, what stops all of us from seeing clearly are our thoughts—specifically, distracting thoughts of greed, anger, and delusion, the three poisons. Thoughts of "I want this" when we see something we don’t have. Thoughts of "I don’t want this" when we’re faced with something we don’t like. (Think of anger as an extreme form of aversion.) Thoughts of “Things are this way,” when they’re actually otherwise.
Really, what stops all of us from seeing clearly are our thoughts—specifically, distracting thoughts of greed, anger, and delusion, the three poisons.
This sutra, the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, lays out very precisely five ways to work with these types of thoughts or signs (nimitta), as the Buddha calls them.
Nimitta are images or mental signs, they stand in for an object, giving us its generic appearance, which we then take to be real. I take my image of person, for example, to be real and inherently existing. Or I take my image of an object—money—and imbue it with a kind of solidity, a kind of existence, and then go chasing after it.
To clear up this confusion, we have to train the mind, we have to see the signless. There’s another sutta, called the Nimitta Sutta, in which the Buddha speaks of three wholesome signs: concentration, energy, and equanimity. If you want to train your mind, he says, you need these three signs, because if you just focus on one—for example, concentration—then you might get lazy. You could get very focused and yet not be engaged with the thing you’re focusing on. You become very good at seeing a thought, letting it go, and coming back, without realizing that there are certain thoughts you need to look at, before you let them go. With this type of concentration, we become a bit blind.
If, on the other hand, we just develop energy, then we could get restless. This happens particularly during long retreats. We’re building samadhi, and if we don’t know how to harness that energy, then we get really antsy. My first full sesshin at the monastery, I ended up doing sprints after supper one night. No one said anything to me.
They probably thought, “Oh poor thing, let her tire herself, get some of that energy out.” But after sitting and sitting all week, it was too much energy for me to hold. I didn’t know how. Then the last one—if we just cultivate equanimity, then we might not garner enough concentration. We kind of flatline: it’s all cool and calm but nothing’s really happening. We’re not getting any clearer.
We therefore need all three—concentration, energy, and equanimity—to gain the higher mind, the Buddha said, the higher mind being the eight jhanas that lead to insight and liberation. It’s called “higher” because it’s higher than the good mind that practices the precepts. If practicing the precepts is like building a raft, training the mind is learning to navigate. The first will keep you afloat, but it’s the second that will take you where you want to go. It’ll take you all the way to the end of suffering, dukkha.
Now, the early sutras sometimes compare this practice of training the mind to the taming of a wild animal. They say an animal trainer doesn’t use just one or two techniques to bring the animal in line, they use all the various means at their disposal. The same is true for us. “See a thought, let it go, and come back” is a good starting point, but it’s not going to see us through a whole life or even a whole meditation period.
Some thoughts you drop and they return. Some thoughts you don’t want to drop, so part of the work is getting yourself to the point where your own peace of mind, your own freedom, is more compelling than whatever story you’ve concocted. You have to believe that being happy and peaceful and satisfied—truly satisfied—is more important than being entertained or affirmed in some way. In other words, you have to want to be free more than you want to be right. Some thoughts you can’t even see because they’re buried so deep, yet they’re still wreaking havoc, causing you to act in all sorts of unskillful ways.
In other words, you have to want to be free more than you want to be right.
Because the mind is a wily creature, it helps to have different tools, not to control it, but to work with it better. This is what the Vitakkasanthana Sutta helps us to do. It offers five tools or wholesome signs for taming the mind. These are: switching an unskillful sign for a skillful one, warning yourself of the dangers of unskillful thoughts, ignoring those thoughts that won’t help you or lead you to liberation, tracing those thoughts back to their roots to see their empty nature, and chopping or cutting them down, before they have time to proliferate. My own mnemonic for this series is the acronym SWITCH for switch, warn, ignore, trace, and chop.
Let’s look at switch first.
SWITCH: Tools for Buddhist Practice
Just to be clear that although the sutra was written specifically for practitioners working with their minds in meditation, we can really use these tools at any time we notice these distracting thoughts of anger or ill will, thoughts of greed or of clinging, thoughts that cause confusion or misunderstanding. Any time we face one of these, we can apply these tools. It’s just that the process is a bit easier to do and to track when we’re quiet and focused. We first train ourselves to use these tools in meditation, so that we can then use them whenever these types of thoughts get in the way of our lives. We first practice when it’s easy, so we’ll have a better chance when it’s hard.
You’re sitting, happily counting your breath or following your breath, when a thought suddenly interrupts your concentration. You have an image of that thing you said in a meeting and the way everyone got quiet and just… looked at you. As you have this memory, your heart drops into your stomach, and before you have a chance to stop it, there’s the thought, “They hate me. I hate me.” But that’s too painful to bear, so you do one of two things: you either start playing a movie in your mind—you remember that awesome camping trip you went to last summer and how good you were at tying knots and building fires and using a compass and generally being the competent person you know yourself to be—making yourself feel better, or you project outward, transferring that painful feeling to the people who “made you feel it.” “I don’t care if they hate me. This is a shitty place to work anyway, and everyone knows the boss is a jerk. I doubt he’ll make it to the end of the year, so I’m not going to worry about him or anyone else. I’m just going to do my thing.” Either way, your far, far from your higher mind. You’re far from your middle mind, even, and you’re down in the pits, trying to find some trace of light.
The first step to work with this type of thought, then, is to recognize it. We can’t do anything with it if we don’t even know it’s happening, which means we have to be clear enough to see that we’ve gone off track. That’s why it helps to first train your mind in meditation. In the middle of the meeting, you might not be able to catch what’s happening as it’s happening, but in the quiet of your zazen, it’ll be much easier to see, “Oh, I misplaced my breath but I’d like to get it back, and here’s how I can do that.”
The sutra doesn’t say this, but to be able to use any of these five signs, these five nimitta, we first need careful or appropriate attention: yoniso manasikara, which is also translated as wise attention or systematic reflection, and of course, there’s a sutra for it as well:
I say that the getting rid of anxieties and troubles is possible for one who knows and sees, not for one who does not know and see. What must one know and see in order to get rid of anxieties and troubles? Wise reflection and unwise reflection. For one who reflects unwisely, there arise anxieties and troubles that have not yet arisen, and those that have already arisen increase. But for one who reflects wisely, anxieties and troubles that have not yet arisen do not arise, and those already arisen disappear.
These sutras can sometimes appear to be very circular or very simple in their logic, but in their simplicity lies their power. For one who doesn’t pay attention, anxieties and troubles arise (another translation has these as the taints).
For one who pays careful or wise attention, anxieties and troubles do not arise. We can test this for ourselves.
For one who pays careful or wise attention, anxieties and troubles do not arise. We can test this for ourselves. We can look at our minds and see, is this true? When we become quiet and still, when we look deeply and carefully, we can confirm that when we’re not careful, when we’re not wise, all sorts of anxieties and troubles arise. We believe there’s a self and that there are others, we believe there are things and that we should cling to them, we believe we can somehow escape old age, sickness, and death, and on and on. It’s not hard to see the trouble our distraction and our confusion lead us into. Just as it’s not hard to see that when we pay careful attention, wise attention, things become much more manageable.
One commentator says that for it to be yoniso manasikara, the effect of our attention must be positive. I may be feeling bad about everyone looking at me during the meeting, but when I apply wise attention to this memory, the feedback I get in my mind is positive. I’m no longer caught, I’m starting to turn, my mind is no longer bucking or pulling at the rope—it’s settled down and it’s ready to listen. The wild animal it’s starting to quiet. We have to be attentive enough to notice that something’s going on—that we said we were going to follow our breath, or listen to a friend who needed to talk, but here we are, chasing after a story and our samadhi is out the window. But now we’ve noticed.
Now we can apply the first of the skillful signs and switch that unwholesome thought—“They hate me, I hate me”—with a wholesome one. Just as a skilled carpenter or their apprentice might knock out, remove, and extract a coarse peg by means of a fine one, so too when a practitioner gives attention to some other sign connected with what is wholesome, their mind becomes steadied internally, quieted, brought to singleness, and concentrated. In that knocking of the unwholesome with the wholesome, you’re bringing the mind back to concentration. It isn’t just, Think positive thoughts, Switch from the negative to the positive, it’s, Align your mind and reestablish your concentration; why? For the purpose of liberating it.
What would that wholesome thought be? That’s up to you, but we have plenty to draw from in the teachings. We have metta: May I be safe, may I be happy, may I be free from worry or despair. We have the Third Bodhisattva Vow—master the dharmas—in the words of my young student: “May I learn from all that can teach me.” We have the Four Immeasurables: “May I be safe, may I be kind, may I be joyful, may I be awake. May they be safe, may we be kind, joyful, and awake.” The Seventh Grave Precept: “I will realize self and other as one—I will not elevate the self and blame others.” Or the Ninth Precept: “I will actualize harmony—I will not be angry.”
Buddhism is filled with nimitta designed to help us work with unhelpful thoughts: Meditation on the impurity of the body to counter lust, Loving-kindness to replace ill will, Impermanence to substitute clinging, Equanimity to balance bias, etc. But if you can’t remember your Buddhism, you can always fall back on yourself. If the thought was, “They hate me, I hate me,” you can switch it with, “I love you. It’s okay. You’re okay.” If offering love to yourself makes you cringe, stop to reflect why that is—why you don’t hesitate to pile on the self hate, even indirectly, but to love yourself feels unreachable or unreasonable or just plain dumb. We get what we repeat. In other words, our habitual thoughts shape who we become.
Angry thoughts give birth to angry people. Self-hating thoughts give birth to self-hating people. It’s not complicated—but it’s very, very powerful. That’s why learning to switch our unwholesome thoughts with wholesome ones is so important, so necessary, if we want to deepen and brighten our mind. Remember what the sutra says, now in a different translation:
When a practitioner gives their attention to a skillful sign, the unskillful thoughts are eliminated; they disappear. By their elimination, the mind stands firm, settles down, becomes unified and concentrated, … [in the object of meditation].
One who succeeds in overcoming distracting thoughts, Bikkhu Bodhi says, is called “a master of the courses of thought” or, more simply, One who has mastered their mind.
Practicing Discernment
One thing to keep in mind as we continue to move through this five-sign sequence, is that this is one of those tools that is somewhat sequential. Switch, as the first tool, is the easiest to apply. You don’t have to think about it too much—you notice an angry thought, and you replace it with a loving one. In other words, to switch the energy behind a thought doesn’t take that much effort and it doesn’t require understanding. Here you’re not trying to get clear about why you’re angry, you’re simply treating anger as a distracting thought and replacing it with another that will help, not hinder your concentration.
There’s a place for understanding the origin and history of a thought but that’s not in zazen. Here you’re simply trying to remove the obstacles to the mind’s natural, bright, cognizant nature. You’re wiping the mirror clean, instead of getting involved with every particle of dust, and to do this, the other tool that we need is discernment, prajna, which in Buddhism is wisdom. Fundamentally, it’s seeing things as they are. Very practically, it’s seeing what’s needed in relationship to those things.
This discernment will come in handy as we move through the other signs. Do I need to be careful here, keep my distance? Can I just ignore this and let it fade? Do I need to cut this at the root, or can I work with it for a bit? This is what, to me, is so empowering about our practice. At each moment, it’s you applying your own effort, your own discernment, your own correction, if that’s needed. No one else can do it for you. The teacher can point, the sutras can guide, but in the end, it’s you who’ll try on a practice and you who’ll see the result.
Let me leave you with a teaching called the Four Reliances:
Rely on the teachings, not the teacher;
Rely on the meaning, not the words;
Rely on the definitive meaning, not the provisional meaning;
Rely on wisdom, not on knowledge (or consciousness).
“Test it,” the Buddha would’ve said, “and then see for yourselves.”
Explore further
01 : When No Thing Works | Buddhist Practice During Crisis with Zuisei Goddard
02 : Instructions on Not Giving Up (aka SWITCH) with Zuisei Goddard
03 : Restlessness and Worry with Zuisei Goddard
Working with Difficult Thoughts, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast, video, and transcript available.