Good day to you.

Mostly talk today--thinking and talk--but there's a general exercise here that you can practice, too, to study your thinking.

One of my teachers--I can't remember who--once told me: "The way you know that you've got a problem is that you're thinking about it."

I've found that particular insight to be very profound over my lifetime. It helps me to realize again and again: "that reactive thinking is going on."

For it's no news that we humans have thinking. Everybody knows that. The news, however, may be that we can watch our thinking with awareness. And in watching our thinking, we can have many interesting insights and understandings about both what we think, and how.

For one thing, we can have the insight that the thinking we do is often highly reactive to the circumstances. When things that matter happen, we do a lot of thinking about it. In this way, thinking mimics materiality. (But it is not real life, itself!)

By now, if you've practiced having so many other kinds of awarenesses, the general exercise here may be fairly easy to do. But in the ordinary human condition, it's very hard to realize that one's thinking is going on.

So the general exercise today is simply to realize, from time to time, during the course of the day, that your thinking is going on. Realize that you can have glimpses of it, a moment after. And, whatever you happen to be thinking about at the time, you can see that it's obvious and apparent that it was "only thinking."

"Good old thinking!" you can even say! For thinking can serve us. And thinking can rule us. And when it does rule us, we don't even know. So you might have to set some alarms to remind yourself to do this, or leave some notes around to yourself as a strategy, as well.

This exercise is just like any of the other exercises in these classes. It is just a matter of re-directing one's attention from wherever it just happens to be at the moment over into an examination of what one is going along thinking at that very moment.

For, except for brief silences, the thinking is almost always going on. We just don't notice it. Like that background beyond your computer, it is in the shadows, vaguely there, and yet we don't really see it most of the time. Indeed, one could almost say that we are "lost" in it. And this exercise is for bringing your thinking into the light.

This exercise with thinking is just the same as when you have brought the hardness of your desk, the softness of the space between you and your monitor, and the sharp details of whatever is off there in the background behind your computer "into the realm of light."

Human thinking can, in part, be a series of remembered visual images, or even imagined visual images. These may be vague, but we can see colors, and shapes, and even expressions. There can be a powerful verisimilitude in it. It can be--in our thinking on a given occasion-- that we are being punished severely by someone else, and hurt a lot in it. And such is the scope of our thinking that we can even be holding someone else in our arms, someone we know, or someone we don't even know, and feel ecstatic. (There is no end to the variety of things that our human thinking can think about and invent.)

On the one side there is this very physical quality of verisimilitude in our thinking. And on the other side, thinking is also, and mainly, a lot of words.

In particular, we can focus here in kindergarten on this chief characteristic of thinking--the cognitive side, the conceptual side-- which shows that we think a lot of words when we are thinking. This is the thinking/talking side. It thinks in words, and it talks in words. And these are not just random words. We are often talking to ourselves with these words, and other people that we saw in the past can be talking to us, too, and we can "hear them."

We can have a whole conversation with someone in our thinking. This conversation can include words that actually were, and never were, said before. We can even have a conversation with an inamimate object in our thinking (like our car, or a cake that we are baking). And it can talk back! It can mock us! Thinking is the talking voices in our heads. These voices talk with words--all expressing concepts about reality.

Sometimes it is an anonymous voice that is talking to you directly, just as if someone were standing there. Sometimes it is a voice that is answering that voice for you. And all and any of this is completely normal for all and any of us. It is the human thinking mind, and we all have one.

It talks to us "in our heads." It thinks and it talks in words. The thinking mind tries to explain life to us, figure things out, and make sense out of things in the real life. Sometimes referred to as "the internal dialogue," it proceeds on its own, as if it has an independent life of its own. Thinking just "pops up" and happens, and keeps happening.

When we can see and understand this, we can understand why resistance to our thinking doesn't work. When we want to stop our thinking about something, when we want to control our thinking, and force it to think about something else, it just doesn't work very well, or for very long. The impetus for thinking to "keep popping up again" is still there, because that is thinking's thing.

Thinking (as "delicate" as it appears to be) keeps forcing itself into the territory of our minds. And if we try to resist it, then it usually makes the thinking intensify and proliferate. (You probably know some word-games that illustrate this principle. "Don't think of a . . . 'pink elephant.'" For a little while, a child is thrust into being "a phenomenologist," witnessing their own mind, as "pink elephant" keeps popping up there, again and again. And all the kids laugh, and you drop it. But, in the more unpleasant encounters of our everyday lives--contemplate this, if you will--people don't generally "just drop it." Unpleasant encounters have a way of "hanging around" and causing more trouble later.

So let's say that a person is feeling really bad about an encounter that they had with another person. And they are thinking about it. The other person said some mean things. And they said some mean things, themselves. Although there was an opportunity for a harmonious collaboration on something or other in the beginning, that all seems to be spoiled now, and the two people are--at least for a little while--"estranged."

This is a common type of situation--analagous to nearly anything that happens in your life where you are relating with others and somehow things "turn bad." It could be at the office, or at home, or where you go swimming. And there are a variety of common reactions that people have in these uncomfortable situations that we can call attention to here.

First of all, when the original argument or upset scenario was going on, both of the people were being severely impacted by the mean things that each of them said. And the way the human body usually reacts to upsets such as these begins with this: having emotional feelings that go on after the argument is over, and having the reactive thinking about it that goes on afterwards, as well.

I, personally, theorize that it is the very pent-up tensions of these emotional feelings that result from these "impacts" in social situations, which provide "the energy" that drives the thinking mind in putting out all the thoughts and words that it will put out then.

I see these tight muscles acting like a rubber band airplane, where the slow unwinding of the rubber-band actually "flies" the airplane. That is, I theorize that it is the pent-up energies of emotional feelings that drive the thinking mind, and, indeed, drive the body as a whole to actually expend the energy that is expended when the body attacks, when the body "acts-out," when the body reacts to the impacts of life with wounding manipulations and wounding defense mechanisms against other people.

From living a lot with these perceptible internal processes (by practicing awareness daily) that view seems very plausible to me in my experiences. And there are other teachers, such as Perls, and Gurdjieff, who also said that emotional feelings precede thinking.

Anyway, in the situation that I have described here, where there has been a hostile encounter between two people, and one then goes home afterwards to "stew about it," so to speak, one typical common reaction to that encounter is that a person will think about it over and over again.

This thinking will have great physical verisimilitude. One will see visions of the encounter, perhaps the expressions on the other person's face. One may hear the other person saying those mean things that they said. Perhaps one will hear one's own voice arguing with the other, as one argued then. To some degree, the scene will be re-enacted in thinking. And you may add-in variations during this thinking. You may even add-in a fantasy version where it turns out great! But then the other version comes back, as if it is "haunting" you.

And if the trauma of the encounter was sufficient enough, one may repeat the re-enactment of this scenario over and over again during the following days. Indeed, it is possible that this scenario will come back to one's memory from time to time for the rest of one's life, if the trauma has been great enough. Usually, we seem to "get over it" after some period of time, a prolonged period, long or short, in which there is always more pain and suffering.

Suppose, hypothetically, the other person said to you: "You're ugly. You deserve to be punished. I'm glad that you're suffering now. I want you to hurt more." (This is ridiculous hyperbole, yet sometimes people talk to each other like this.) The sounding of words such as these reaching your ears and buffeting your body has a tremendous and powerful impact on your physical body when it occurs.

Things, bodies, and sounds (like words) in space have impact. (We'll discuss this principle more fully later.) Each time you go back to stewing about the encounter, your thinking is having this impact upon your body again and again. Although not spoken aloud, those words vibrating in your thinking have impact all over again!

If the person is someone important to you, someone you care about, for instance, let's say your boss, or your spouse, the words "I want you to hurt more" had especially severe impact when you originally heard them. And powerful emotional reactions were kicked off in your body then, when the impact of those words struck you.

And when you are stewing, and you repeat those words in your thinking, they have severe impact on your body all over again (even though you are only re-creating the vibrations of them in your head). And those same powerful emotional reactions are kicked off again (whichever comes first, emotions or thinking).

On your own side of the issue, if you hear a voice in your thinking silently shouting "I want to get back at you, you dirty so-and-so!" the vibration of this voice, too, has impact on your physical body, and "puts it through the wringer," so to speak. So you lose both ways when you have this kind of post argument thinking going on. It impacts you when you re-create what the other person did and said. And it impacts you when you put up your "imaginary" fight back. And both impacts drain you, deplete you, wear you down.

Yes, such conversations in our thinking are "only imaginary," but they, in and of themselves, are real--that is, the events of sitting there thinking about it afterwards are real. And they have a profound affect on our body's state of relaxation and comfort. They make us uptight. By stewing, we make ourselves uptight over and over, every time we do it again.

When the event actually happened, it was "reality." When you are thinking about it later, it is only a verisimilitude of reality, and a bunch of words. "It's only thinking."

If nothing else, one can see that the typical ordinary way that human beings react to traumatic social encounters such as this, is very painful and self-wounding. It isn't bad enough that you had to go through this wounding when it happened, but you have to go through it all over again when you are thinking about it afterwards.

There is something else that one can do about it. And it doesn't do any good to resist having these memories of traumas keep coming up. ("Out, out, damned spot!") Because the more you resist it, the more it will keep coming back up. You can't erase it. You can't expunge it. (You can only "outlive it,"--"get over it," in the ordinary human condition). And the thinking about it, such as it is, "keeps bubbling up, as if with a life of its own."

But you can get a handle on this typical difficult situation in life with awareness. It is as if you can step back from your own stewing. It is as if you can put your own stewing "on the examination table," and you can take a step back from it and look it over very closely, and see everything about it that is going on.

This isn't resistance. This is "relating with it as it is."

First, you can shift the focus of your attention, on purpose, from the stewing syndrome that has got you caught up in it, and you can re-focus your attention--with awareness--inside your body.

And you can scope around with awareness inside there and take "an inventory," so to speak, of any tensions and unpleasant sensations that you can locate in there. Those are your "negative feelings."

We did some study of this in yesterday's class, where we discussed "processing feelings with awareness" to enable your body to let go of negative emotional feelings, and let them just fade away.

Secondly, we can deal with our thinking mind, and all that it is doing in this traumatic and painful situation. We can look at this also as "processing the thinking mind," or we can phrase it as "seeing through the thinking mind for what it is."

For when we shift the focus again, onto what our thinking mind is thinking, we can study what it is thinking in an intelligent way. We can see, first of all, that it is "only thinking."

Many people think that they are their thinking mind! That's what the philosopher Descartes said ("I think, therefor I am."). But there is also this other perspective, using one's awareness, in which one can realize first: "I experience, therefor I am."

And in this mode of simply experiencing, directly and honestly, the whatever it is that is going on--in this case, in the thinking mind (which one can then watch, and study). One can recognize that, no, they are not their thinking mind. Rather, they are, obviously and apparently, in the experience of it, their experiencing mind that is watching and studying. The thinking mind is just a part of their being, like emotional feelings. It is a part that they can observe with their experiencing mind.

It is not that I am my thinking mind, in this perspective. It is that I have a thinking mind. It is not that I am my emotional feelings. It is that I have emotional feelings. Who "I am" is actually being here now, experiencing, and being able to observe this thinking and these emotional feelings.

Here we may have one of the most major insights of all. For if I am not my thinking and my emotions, and I can see them objectively for what they are in these awareness, then I can do something about them. I can work on the emotions and the thinking that I have!

Working on the emotions is simply a matter of processing them, by shifting the focus of my awareness upon them directly and just "experiencing them out"--"purging them," so to speak, with the "light" of my conscious experience.

Working on the thinking is simply a matter of processing the thinking, by shifting the focus of my awareness to the thinking mind, and just "seeing it for what it is."

What does this mean, "seeing it for what it is?" Well, thinking is a lot of words (as well as visions). And these words in thinking are all about life. It is "second-hand." The thinking is all about life, and not the life, itself, that we can also see, hear, smell, taste, and touch--"the real thing" that we can know, "with absolute certainty," and have awarenesses of, in our experience! No thinking is needed for this. No words, no concepts, just direct experiences.

Thinking isn't "the real thing." It is a story about the real thing. Realizing this is the main factor in knowing what it means to see thinking for what it is. It is just thinking. The real thing really was happening then, when the event happened. And this isn't then; it is now. And this thinking is a fantasy with great physical verisimilitude that has powerful affects on one's body. And it isn't the real thing.

People tend to believe the validity of their own thinking. Even when they tend to doubt their own thinking, they still think it is the best thing we've got. That is, people who haven't learned about awareness, tend to believe in and rely on their thinking solely. People who learn about awareness may begin, little by little, placing more and more credence in their direct experiences, because they realize that the direct experiences that they have with awarenessess are all the real thing.

And by cultivating this insight into human life, a person becomes able to work on their emotional feelings, and work on their intellectual thinking.

There can be many different ways to break down the constituents of intellectual thinking into different aspects, or parts. There are past fantasies (or, memories) and future fantasies (projections into the future). And these are fantasies because they aren't really happening in the present (when this thinking is what's going on instead). One can learn many useful things from contemplating "being in the present," and how the present is the only place, literally, where we can actually do anything about anything. But we'll cover this on another day this year.

I'm gonna take a break at this point, and pick up with this in tomorrow's class. We'll take a look at other basic negative emotional feelings that accompany fear in the spectrum of basic human emotions--such as, loneliness, anger, jealousy, shame, anxiety, sadness, and guilt--and study out where to look for the sensations of these negative feelings with your awareness in your body, when you are interested in inwardly exploring "how you feel."

The successful maneuver of effectively "processing the negative emotional feelings" may not mean that "the emotional episode" is entirely over for the person. Because the thinking about it may still be going on. And the thinking about it, stewing, telling the "paranoid" story, for example, over and over again in the mind, can still go on, even after our recognition that the underlying, unperceived fear (in the realm of shadows) has ended.

So in order to do a full healing of oneself in these situations, one has to deal rather thoroughly with both the emotional feelings and the intellectual thinking that is going on.

Here, too--with the cognitive thinking we do, "the concepts we have of the story"-- that same principle applies. With thinking, as it is with feelings: "Resistance creates persistence."

We'll take this farther, on up ahead. "Resist not evil," one said, but "Get thee behind me, Satan." It's about "t'ai chi-ing" it, not resisting. Seeing it, and slipping it, not ignoring it, or fighting it. Being with it, in awareness. Stepping aside. It's simply a part of learning how to become more and more real.

Remember today's exercise, now, if you'd like to practice this. Pause and check in from time to time during the day, and see if you can notice that some thinking is going on. Simply try at first to be able to see that it is "only thinking."

And if you really want to start getting fancy, at those same times, check-in with your body inside there, scope around for any sensations of inward feelings that you can find anywhere around.

(Fun coaching tip: Often it's very interesting to see if one can correlate the two, the inner sensations of feelings, and the thinking that is going on.)

-- John

(Use this Classroom Talk button if you've got questions.)

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