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By Root 329 0

postpone their consideration until after the thought-watching session is over. But to decide now, when we already know what to do for the next quarter-hour, what we will do next is a one-step anticipation. We’ve already realized that it’s unnecessary to complete the dwarf list at this time; but we don’t yet see that it’s equally unnecessary to decide, at this time, when we will complete it or whether we’ll complete it at all. Here again we may suffer from a piling up of one trapped idea upon another. When we come to understand that “I’ll do it after thought-watching” is anticipatory, we tell ourselves that we needn’t decide now when to do it—that we will consider the problem of when to do it after thought-watching is over. But this idea commits again the very trap it wishes to disavow. We needn’t decide now when to complete the dwarf list, and we needn’t decide now when to decide.

After the dizzying spirals of reversion, formulation, regulation, and anticipation, it’s refreshing to contemplate the simpleminded obtuseness that causes us to accelerate during thought-watching. As in the previous cases, we look in at the moment we catch ourselves persisting in the construction of a useless dwarf list. Wishing to get back to thought-watching, we may berate ourselves for our failure (reversion), tell ourselves what we are supposed to be doing (formulation), order ourselves back to work (regulation), or reschedule the intrusive project for a later time (anticipation)—all of which are as different from thought-watching as the original persistence was. Another strategy is to try to rush through the intrusive project as rapidly as possible so that we may sooner return to thought-watching. That is, we add the trap of acceleration to our original persistence. Now we are not only thinking about the dwarf list. We are also thinking about the end of the dwarf project— about how desirable it is to reach the end, how close we are to the end, and so on. Our concern with finishing as quickly as possible is a second intrusive project that takes us even further away from the attitude of thought-watching. In addition to ideas like “Dopey” and “Isn’t there one that starts with an M?” we’re also thinking, “Only two more to go and I’ll be done!”

Fixation is a marvelously subtle phenomenon of thought-watching. At first glance, it may even seem that the occasion of thought-watching is incompatible with its occurrence. Since we don’t have a future goal in mind, what is there for us to wait for? What we often wait for in thought-watching is the end of the thought-watching session. Instead of just watching our thoughts, we conceive of ourselves as engaged in a mental exercise having a certain duration. We think of getting through a session to the end as scoring a point in some private game. The result is that we have a project to keep us busy from beginning to end: finishing the session. Of course this particular project doesn’t require us to do anything. The completion of the thought-watching session can’t be expedited; it comes by itself. We are just like a host waiting for his guests to arrive, and we make the same mistake: we begin to mark time. We may actually keep track of how much time is left: “One more minute to go … thirty seconds …” Or we may sit in a state of suspension, not actually thinking about the end but mutely straining toward it nonetheless. In either case, we become so intent on having watched our thoughts that we forget all about watching them.

When someone calls us from downstairs while we are thought-watching, we may adamantly resist the interruption, telling ourselves that we’re not going to stop our exercise for anything. We may even shout back with annoyance: “Don’t bother me now. I’m watching my thoughts!” But we couldn’t have such an idea unless we had already stopped watching our thoughts. Indeed, we quit watching as soon as we become aware of being interrupted. Had we abided in a purely observational attitude, the call from downstairs would have been no more than a sound, like the whistling of the wind. To experience