Minding your mind
Not thinking about thinking
“I'm contemplating thinking about thinking — it's overrated, just get another drink in…”. — Robbie Williams 1
I was recently reminded of a talk I attended some 30 years ago, at the University Centre here in Cambridge, by a meditation teacher from India with over fifty years of spiritual practice.
Having finished speaking, she then invited questions from the audience.
One of the academics stood up and asked a very convoluted question — which was actually more of a mini-lecture — that culminated in asking the speaker how what she had talked about related to the work of Wittgenstein. 2
She looked at him sympathetically and said, very sweetly: “The problem with you Westerners is you think too much”.
I remember it vividly because it made me wonder: “Do I think too much?”
And then I realised I was thinking about thinking. And that made me think: “Oh wow — I’m thinking about the fact that I’m thinking about thinking”.
I had gone to the talk because I’d taken up meditation myself a few years earlier, and was frankly still pretty useless at it.
Meditation involves mastering the mind — and my mind did not want to be mastered. It wanted to carry on doing whatever it wanted, however it wanted, whenever it wanted. Thinking about thinking about thinking….
In my first guided meditation back in August 1990, the meditation teacher put on some gentle music and said to me and my wife:
“We learn to meditate with eyes open, so we can do it in more everyday situations. Just gently rest your gaze somewhere in the distance without staring, and I'll speak a few words”.
So, I focused my gaze on the carpet on the other side of the room.
And I listened.
But not to her words.
To my own thoughts.
About carpets…
“I've never given much thought to carpets before. I mean, you don't, do you? Unless you’re thinking of buying one, I suppose.”
“This one looks to be quite good quality. Probably wool. But not just wool. There's bound to be some man-made fibre in the mix.”
I wonder where the wool came from. Maybe Australia. They have lots of sheep down there.
And the man-made fibre would presumably have come from a petroleum-based feedstock, maybe from the Middle East.
I wonder how they put the wool and synthetic fibres together to make the finished carpet?
Is it one strand of wool followed by one of fibre and so on in an evenly distributed way throughout the whole carpet?
Or are there patches that are mostly wool, and patches that are mostly synthetic fibre?
And how do they get the strands of wool and fibres to end up being the same length — so the surface of the carpet is flat?
Do they cut them to the finished length before they’re woven together into the backing?
Or do they start with random lengths, create a carpet that's all higgledy-piggledy, and then pass it through a kind of giant lawnmower towards the end of the production process?
At this point the meditation teacher switched off the music and asked: “So what was your experience?”
My wife said: “Oh it was amazing. I felt so light and peaceful. Like I’d been transported to another dimension and left any concerns and problems far behind”.
“Wow” I thought. “That sounds great.”
Then the teacher turned to me: “And what was your experience?”
“Very interesting” I said, somewhat embarrassed that I hadn’t listened to a single word of her commentary…
But it had been very interesting, because I’d discovered something I hadn’t realised before.
I had absolutely no control over my mind.
I’d wasted the whole guided meditation thinking about carpets, when I might have had a similar experience to my wife.
And I might have gained insights that would have helped me master my mind.
Which was the reason we’d gone to the meditation centre in the first place...
Over the following weeks, months, and years I discovered that learning to master the mind is a similar process to how small children learn to walk.
A child doesn’t start walking by taking an online course on Udemy, or by studying lower limb anatomy, or by downloading a perambulation app.
It learns by trying to walk — and falling over.
A lot.
And getting back up.
And falling over again — but a bit less often.
Eventually it becomes so good at not falling over it’s now walking.
Similarly, by learning over time to be less and less distracted by other thoughts, the mind becomes better behaved.
But usually only after a lot of metaphorical ‘falling down’ — the mind jumping elsewhere, and when we notice, regaining our focus.
This tendency of the mind to hop about all over the place is sometimes referred to as monkey mind.
And many of the technologies we use today — smartphone apps, social media platforms, streaming services — explicitly target the monkey mind by dangling digital bananas in front of us so our attention is drawn and held where the designers want it.
So it can be monetised.
But we can turn the tables on these digital banana danglers, and use their distractions to our advantage.
In recent years I’ve cultivated the habit that whenever my phone beeps, pings, or buzzes, instead of immediately doing its bidding I repurpose its attempts to grab my attention — to remind me to step back from my thinking for a few moments and enjoy some silence before then deciding where next to focus my attention.
It’s much more productive than defaulting to the distraction of digitally-induced dopamine hits.
It also helps ensure that I use my devices as opposed to them using me.
Digital devices can be useful servants.
But they make poor masters.
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Lyric from “Come Undone” a track on Robbie Williams’ fifth studio album Escapology (2002) and released as a single on 31 March 2003 by Chrysalis Records.
I specifically remember this because Wittgenstein’s grave is only a couple of miles from the venue.
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