“Rest in great natural peace. This exhausted mind, beaten helplessly by karma and neurotic thought, like the relentless fury of the pounding waves, in the infinite ocean of samsara.”

Nyoshul Rinpoche

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The alarm rings. Consciousness is returned from a subliminal world, the sweet softness of dream lingers, and rest is found in a liminal state, for all of a matter of seconds. Should I lie in for an extra ten minutes? That sounds nice. But I’ve got to be at work in two hours. And hearing the rain I know the traffic will be worse, and it’s only my third week so I can’t even risk being late. But come on… It’s only ten more minutes. What difference could that make? Well, I still need to iron a shirt, shower, make a coffee, get my lunch ready, and brush my teeth. So maybe a lot of difference. I’m pretty sure the science says anyway that you shouldn’t have caffeine for the first hour of the day. Sod the coffee. Maybe I’ll actually go on a three-week caffeine detox. That would be cool. Okay, that’s decided. And if I’m not making a coffee, I’m sure that buys me the necessary ten minutes I need to just snooze my alarm for a little. For sure. But I’d better check the traffic on Google Maps before I do, just in case.

Every day, from the moment we wake to the moment we sleep, our brains are constantly in conversation with themselves. We spend much of the precious time we have either thinking about the past, which is immutably determined, or thinking about the future, which almost invariably never materialises as we imagine it. Many meditation teachers and spiritual gurus, including The Dragon Warrior, have observed this aspect of human experience, as has modern science. Harvard psychologists Mathew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, in an article titled “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind”, found that people spend 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they are currently occupied with. I’d be astounded if the actual number weren’t closer to something like 90%.

I’m not writing here about deliberate thinking, such as the kind required for solving complex problems. These kinds of processes have a place and are essential for the formulation of resilient societies and fruitful lives. What I am writing about instead, is the uncontrolled programmes that are brains are constantly running and that we are constantly racing to keep up with. Questions arise, often unprompted. ought I go to this work social tonight? what should I wear tonight? where should I be living when I’m 30? do I still want kids? who am I? when, where why, who, what, where, why, who, what, when why, where, who, who, who. Answering-questions and questioning-answers. We race from one to the next, putting out fires of the mind whilst all infinite others are being lit. But thoughts cannot be fought with thoughts, has said James Low, in the way that fire cannot be fought with fire.

Throughout this year, I spent innumerable hours thinking and worrying about and planning for what I’d do when I got the results back for an economics exam, that I was sure I failed. I did the same with the completion of background and reference checks for the job I’ve recently started. Both took more than six months to come back, and I must have spent many cumulative days contingency planning. The tragic absurdity of this wasted time is not only that I passed both exam and check, but that I’m sure my red-teaming and contingency planning would not have made one iota of difference to the subsequent events had I indeed failed.

But is there an out to such unnecessary suffering and wasted time, short of death? I believe so.

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Thoughts spar with each other, ceaselessly making the case for and against the present object of attention. From a historically ‘Western’ perspective, people often believe themselves to be the thinkers of our thoughts. They are the judges and arbiters of a perfectly realised Athenian town square: differing cases are made, the sunlight of democratic discussion acts as the most effective disinfectant, and the argument grounded in the most reason prevails. To analogise this to a fight, they are omnipotent promoters, referees and judges, dictating not only who the fighters are, but how they fight, and who will win. If we are harmed in this process, it is thus through fault of our own. In endeavouring to improve one’s experience of thought, the Abrahamist would likely instruct, “Think about different things”, “Control your thoughts”, “Don’t listen to them”, or, in returning to the analogy, perhaps “Just pick better fighters”.

From a first-person observational standpoint, I find this perspective to be fundamentally untrue. As most people with experience of Vipassana meditation attest, the constant barrage of thought cannot be stemmed at will. Try it. For the next minute, just focus on your breath. Focus upon a point where you feel it most pertinently (the tip of your nose, or maybe the rise and fall of your chest) and focus your attention on that entirely. Invariably, you’ll be lost in thought after the first breath, maybe the second at best. Thoughts will arise – maybe “This is really easy”, or “This is a waste of time”, or “After I finish reading, I’ll put on dinner”. Despite trying with all one’s might to keep our attention focused on something else, thought will grips, hogties, and carries us off over its disruptive shoulder. Not only is the ‘Western’ or ‘Abrahamic’ position philosophically untenable; in misunderstanding our relationship with thought, it inevitably fails to illuminate a means through which we can escape thought’s binding snare.

It is also misguided in conceptualising of our minds as perfect arbiters of truth. We have biases, assumptions, preferences and fears that march around the town square, or gang up upon one of the fighters, thus irrevocably desecrating the fairness of the contest. Rather like Twitter and other platforms of largely unregulated noise, the best ideas do not simply rise to the surface. There is instead a competition to see who can shout the loudest, and the loudest voice is very rarely equated with being the most sound and rational. With no moment-to-moment awareness of the thoughts that are arising, we helplessly cast ourselves into the stories that are being narrated, and subsequently suffer accordingly.

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From a secondary, dualistic perspective, we see ourselves as observers separate from our thoughts. To return to the cage-fighting metaphor, we cast ourselves as the observing audience.

The violence is brutal, befitting either Old Boy or The Raid. So loud are the screams, so intense is the affair, and so bloody are the fighters, that the the observer cannot distinguish themselves as being separate and untouchable. She feels herself to be in real, visceral danger, and loses herself in the combat to the point that she can no longer see the cage that separates them from her. She maintains a feeling, however, that this arena, and these fighters whom she currently witnesses, are the most important thing in the world. If she doesn’t address this right now she will surely perish. And yet she is safe. Before that fight has barely finished another has begun, with equally blood-lusting warriors taking their place. The ever-renewing conflict will thus produce infinitely replenishing anxiety, anguish and fear, but she will remain unwaveringly unaware of this cycle of suffering.

Inherent to life are experiences of hardship, disappointment, frustration and loss. Such it is to be a human. But we need not also suffer from imagined happenings that we will likely never face. We don’t think of thoughts as illusory appearances in consciousness, but instead, we see them as real instantiations of what we are thinking about. When planning for and thinking about events in the future, we often trigger emotions that would be experienced in such situations. Imagined embarrassment, imagined anxiety and imagined fear all manifest themselves as the very real versions of these things. So easy it therefore is to spiral down one of these tunnels of thought, before being plonked right into the next one without you realising it.

There is a compelling evolutionary mechanism at work here that I think often about. Suppose one was sleeping in the Savannah, ten thousand years ago, with untold and unknown danger lurking about. To imagine the dangers would enable a heightened state of alertness, essential for standing a chance of outrunning a lion. But in the age and country we live in, it is rare that we need such a mechanism to always be switched on. Life-threatening danger does not await us around every corner; starvation, in the UK, is an increasingly rare phenomenon; and homelessness sits at a relatively astounding historic low.

In likening life to that of a video game, my dear friend Ben thinks of there being a main quest, simply to stay alive (by finding shelter, water and food, and avoiding direct threats of violence) and innumerable possible side quests. These describe all other activities, non-instrumental for survival the objects or our desired pursuit (working to get a better job, improving the chances of one’s children, buying a bigger house, or driving a nice car). We so routinely mistake our side quests for being main quests that we live in an unnecessary state of anxiety.

So arises the place of dualistic meditation practice. By focusing our attention on the breath, or sensation, or sound, we can cultivate our capacity to watch thoughts arise and to let them pass.  I once received a beautiful instruction related to this from Thomas Metzinger, in which he likened thoughts to a long line of crying infants. They are all each demanding attention, and insisting they need attention more than any other children. Each thought, like a child, is eager to be acknowledged and can be quite persistent. The key is to observe them without getting pulled in or reacting. Metzinger thus likens the practice of meditation to be akin to picking each child up in turn, giving them a hug, and then placing them down before continuing on to the next. Over time, the children become less emotional and less demanding.

Space can therefore be created between you and your thoughts, enabling a separation and subsequent peace. Practice is then about cultivating this form of attention to gain increased lengths of clarity.

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A third perspective can be found in that of non-dualistic meditation practice, which is found in Buddhist traditions like that of Dzogchen. Such a perspective maintains that even duality itself – the feeling of a subject separate from an object – is itself an illusion. There is no “I” perceiving thought; there is just thought. In returning one last time to the analogy of the cage fighters, from this perspective, we are not the referees, the judges, the promoters, or the audience. We are the canvas itself, the floor of the octagon, on which the dance of conflict is taking place. We are thus sprayed with blood, we are trampled by heavy feet, and we are thwacked by collapsing bodies. To the outsider observer, it would look like we are incurring injury – to ourselves, if we are caught up in our own narratives, it may appear this way too. But the truth is, we incur no injury in the process of thought. Thought is empty. It is devoid of substance, of matter, of truth and of meaning. One wipe with a good mop and the canvas is clean. One clear glimpse of non-duality and we see consciousness as clear, untainted and bright again. Our minds are merely the stage on which the unrelenting Socratic dialogue of thought is played out.

Non-dualistic practice prototypically consists of this recognition. There are multiple paths to this but, in Dzogchen, they manifest themselves as ‘pointing out’ instructions. Whilst meditating on, say, the breath, periodically turn attention upon itself, or look for the one who is looking. Douglas Harding, a British architect-turned-meditation teacher, created a very useful pointing-out instruction of his own, which involves the invocation of the feeling that one is ‘headless’ as a matter of first-person experience. People often find these instructions frustrating, emphatically responding “I am the one who is looking!” or “My head is right here”. I fully empathise with such frustrations, but would advise you to persist nonetheless.

Padmasambhava, an eighth-century Tibetan Buddhist master, is quoted in Sam Harris’ Waking Up, as conceptualising three stages of meditation. In the first stage, “Thought is like [water rushing down a steed mountain]” – tireless, boundless, and impossible to control. In the second stage, “Thought is like a snake tied in a knot”, which given enough time unravels itself. In the third stage, “Thought is like a thief in an empty house” – they come to steal, and yet there is nothing to take.

Whilst on a four-day silent meditation retreat last month I had my first glimpse of non-dualistic experience. Every sense of ‘me’ and of ‘I’, dissolved, leaving only open consciousness and its appearances within it. Born from such experiences is then the possibility for a new relationship with thought. A line from David Whyte’s achingly profound poem, A Seeming Stillness, comes to mind here.

the internal hands of our mind,

always searching for touch, thoughts seeking other

thoughts, seeking other minds

The image evoked, for me, is of blindness and vulnerability and something profoundly lost. If there is no I for your thoughts to involve themselves with, no I for your thoughts to affect, then thoughts are wandering in the wilderness, looking for an illusory soul to attach themselves to which cannot be found. When aware of it, I will endeavour to no longer greet thought with frustration or apathy. Instead, I will turn to it with an open smile of compassion.

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Try not to fight thought. Just observe it. You have arrived. This open, boundless experience of constant flux and change is all you will ever experience. Like sights and sounds and touch and tastes, thoughts will appear in consciousness and then they will disappear, replaced by new ones. For long enough you have been battered and beaten helplessly by neurotic thought. Rest now. Rest in great natural peace.