Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [51]
There is, however, a special exercise that can hasten our progress. Of course, being in a hurry to get rid of traps is itself a trap. But when there’s no pressing business or alluring pleasure over the horizon—when we have “time on our hands”— some of that time may profitably be devoted to the practice of thought-watching. The only equipment needed for thought-watching is a spot reasonably free of external distractions. The instructions couldn’t be simpler: we sit quietly and watch our thoughts. That’s all. In thought-watching, we don’t try to think about anything in particular; but neither do we try to block or interfere with the thoughts that happen to arise. We just watch, as if at a movie.
Almost as soon as we begin this exercise, we learn an important lesson about the mind: thoughts arise by themselves, even if we don’t strive to will them into existence. This truth can be deduced indirectly from our earlier discovery that thinking is often unconscious: obviously, we can’t be willing our ideas into existence when we’re unaware of them. But in thought-watching, we can observe in the full light of consciousness how thoughts come and go by themselves without the benefit of our assistance. To be sure, we can also exert a volitional influence on the stream of ideas. But the stream doesn’t automatically dry up as soon as we cease to exert ourselves. Thoughts continue to flow even when we stop pushing them into being from behind.
But this is only a preliminary observation. Sooner or later, every mental trap encountered in daily life also makes its appearance when we simply sit and watch our thoughts. And because we’ve temporarily suspended our competing interests, we are keener observers. Thought-watching is especially useful for learning to detect the momentary lapses into trapped thinking that are too fleeting to lay hold of in the heat of daily life. But thought-watching doesn’t render the examination of daily life superfluous. It’s only while we’re immersed in the business of living that we commit the longer versions of each trap that consume us for hours, days, or even years at a time. Even here, however, the sensitization that results from thought-watching greatly improves the quality of our observations of daily life.
Fifteen or twenty minutes of thought-watching, practiced more or less daily, will quickly lead to some remarkable discoveries about our mental machinery. The novice thought-watcher will find, however, that thought-watching seems to be a difficult business. Actually, nothing could be easier. But at the beginning we spend very little of our thought-watching time actually watching our thoughts. Instead we try to control the flow of thought—to make it flow in one direction or another, or to suppress it altogether. Of course we can’t simultaneously control our thoughts and just watch them emerge. The attempt to follow this contradictory program makes us increasingly tense. This is why the exercise appears to be difficult.
All this is just as it should be. For it’s precisely at the moment when we leave off thought-watching and start to control that we fall into a trap. The traps don’t simply pop into the range of our observing consciousness amidst other, non-traplike ideas. We commit them. So long as we’re engaged in the enterprise of thought-watching, all intentional meddling with the flow of thought—mental “work” on any project whatever—is a trap. Strictly speaking, the traps don’t come up while we’re thought-watching, but rather when we cease to follow the instructions.
This isn’t to say that we should never try to control our thoughts. On the contrary, exercises to improve our control were discussed in the chapter on division. But we also have to learn to relinquish control when it’s appropriate to do so. If we’ve decided to watch our thoughts, control is useless by definition. In this situation,