How can I stop negative thoughts?

Two problems with the question in the title:

1. No such thing as negative except in your mind. (And yes, there is no such thing as positive either. Novel concept, no?)
2. You can't stop thoughts of any kind. You might as well try to stop yourself breathing.

To expand:

Thoughts arise naturally out of the emptiness. You can't stop them. And if you try, you would be better off trying to stop the Niagara Falls. They will go on forever. Reality check: Thoughts are here to stay. We get to live with them.

And what's so bad about thoughts, anyway? They don't cause problems. We do. The thoughts bubble harmlessly through our awareness until we presume to relate to them. When we believe them, then something happens. We create a relationship to the thoughts. And that relationship is what creates our inner experience. (See the Primer on Reality.) For better or for worse, that thought then settles into our mind. Fun, isn't it?

What happens when you start getting into multiple relationships with multiple thoughts is that it sews into a tight inner experience. And the more thoughts you relate to, the more likely they will argue with reality. Yep, that usually means pain. So how do you get out of that relationship?

Hint: it has nothing to do with killing the thought.

You can NOT, if I haven't already made that absolutely clear, kill a thought. The act of aggression against it is yet another way of relating to it. You draw it even closer. You question your relationship to it. Again and again, until you see the truth of it. The way of it is reality. And you will be free of thought. They will bubble harmlessly away. And you can go your own way. Question and Question until they go. Or stay.

Is that true? If you really look at any thought, and honestly consider whether it might be true, you will find that it isn't. But look at your truth. What is it for you? Look at your reality. What is the way of it? "Yes" or "No" is fine. There are only TWO answers to this question. Yes. And No. If you feel compelled to say anything else, that is a story. If you feel you need to justify your answer, that is a story. If you feel that you need to say more to explain your position, that is a story.

Can you absolutely know that that is true? Sit with it and think about it. This work is about meditation. And again, yes or no is fine, but if you come up with a yes, I challenge you to ask yourself this question: "Can you find one example, one instance, where this thought might not be true?" And yes, you can fudge it all and blithely say no. But if you really sit and try, in spite of the fact that your mind is eagerly straining in the opposite direction, you will find it. In my experience, nothing is absolutely true.

How do you react when you think that thought? When we are not at peace, we are out of balance with reality. The only way that can happen is when our thoughts, our stories, the fables we believe in, are out of sync with reality. We are too focussed on the inner tale. When you believe the thought, you will react in all the ways that make you miserable, angry, irritated, frustrated. Yes, if you are completely strict and honest with yourself, every time you are emotionally out of kilter, if you sit with it long enough, and ask yourself, "Why am I feeling this way?" eventually the thought or belief will come out. It takes practice and experience, because many of these beliefs and thoughts have gone unquestioned, invisible for years, and with our sloppy thinking we believe them. This question asks you to see what thinking that thought is causing you to feel.

Who would you be without that thought? This work is about education. We don't shoo the thought out the door. We don't try and kill it. This is a simple question. We have seen what it is like to be with that thought, and now we see how we would be without that thought. This is the education of self. We see what damage we are doing to ourselves by holding on to thoughts. And if you were smart, you would let it go at this point.

If you didn't want to let it go, then let me explain one other point. IF you believe in peace, then there are only 2 kinds of thought: Stressful and stress-free. Can you find a single stress-free reason to keep your thought? If not, let it go. And if you are committed to it, you will never find a stress-free reason. At least no one has found one yet. There are those who have mistaken stressful reasons as stress-free, of course.

And you can go, "But, but..." all you like. In the paradigm of peace, it is that simple. The "buts" come from another paradigm - the paradigm of right and wrong. The paradigm of arguing with reality. That paradigm will give you loads of reasons to keep the thought. Cultural upbringing, childhood memories, parental beliefs, la di da. The whole load of it. If you are into being right or wrong, that is fine too. But recognise that peace is not guaranteed in that paradigm. If you want peace, then this is one paradigm which will show you a useful way to look at it. If you still want that paradigm, it shows you aren't committed to peace above everything else in your life. You find peace when you place it higher than everything else.

You want something else? You want wealth? You want relationships? You want health? You may or may not get those. Hopeless, really. Life will do exactly what life will do. Nothing more and nothing less. And you may or may not be happy. Reality will rule. That's why so many great ones go nearly to death before they figure this out. Life beats them again and again and again because they argue with it. Then, for the lucky ones, they change priorities. They give up hope, because reality is hopeless. They only want what is, and nothing more, because it is wayyy too painful to argue. That is surrender. That is the end of pain. Where is your priority?

NOTE: I do not represent Byron Katie's work. The questions are hers, and the explanations are mine. It is my way of relating to them. I have a deep respect and appreciation for The Work, but I am not affiliated with them.

"Your son should have died. Give me 3 examples of why that might be true."

Source: Wikimedia

So you guys think you have a tough life? The question in the title is (to my memory, which is my story) an actual question Katie asked of a participant in a workshop. The participant's child had committed suicide.

"Your son should have died. Give me 3 examples of why that might be true."

1. "He was in pain. It was a torture for him to live. Life had become hell, and dying was a relief."
2. "He wanted to die. If I really loved him, I would want for him exactly what he wanted. He wanted to die, and I am glad he managed to fulfil his desire."
3. "He was taking too much time and attention away from the other children. His death was an act of compassion, so that the others would be taken care of. And here I am wasting my time moaning his death when it was such a beautiful gift for the other children, and a chance for me to reconnect."

"If you can find one example, you can find two. If you can find two, you can find three. If you can find three, you can find four. Go on. Find some more."

4. "The financial resources of the family were being sorely taxed. He should have died because the family couldn't possibly have sustained him in any form of comfort that he would have needed to survive from his problem."

"If you can find four, you can find five."

5. "He should have died so that I wouldn't have had to worry about him anymore. I was worrying about him all day and night. Now he's gone, and I don't have to worry about him feeling any pain any more. He's free from pain. And here I am recreating the pain in my own mind and feeling it for him. He's free!"

And if you have issues with any of the reasons, it will very likely have to do with cultural programming that says something like "you shouldn't be happy about death" or "it's not proper to put money over life". You know what? If you can find a single stress-free reason to keep those ideas, let me know.

NOTE: I do not represent Byron Katie's work. The questions are hers, and the explanations are mine. It is my way of relating to them. I have a deep respect and appreciation for The Work, but I am not affiliated with them.

Are YOU In Pain? A Primer in Reality

Okay, I normally would give my readers some nice graphic to go on, but today a simple diagram will do the trick. The topic today is simple - reality. What is, and isn't. And why should you be interested? If you are in pain, and no longer want to be, then you need to know this. If you don't mind suffering, or if you are one of the precious few who are genuinely at peace with themselves, and mosey along, there is nothing to see.

What causes pain?

Let's keep this simple. We have 2 experiences - an outer experience and an inner experience. What is the outer experience? That is the air you breath. That is the chair you are sitting on. That is way of it. It is the way things are. No particular reason. It is the way your child looks at you. It is the way the stars twinkle at night. It is the way clouds are in the sky. That is reality, pure and simple. For some, that is God. Why? Because reality rules. You may or may not like it, but it makes no difference. It ain't going away.

The inner experience is your story. These are the thoughts you have that are related (or unrelated) to outer experience. Your inner experience is the story you tell yourself, and when you believe it, you may be letting yourself in for a world of pain. When you sit in a room, that is your outer experience. When you are "alone" in a room. That is a story. Alone is a story. It puts yourself mentally in a place where it feels bad (or good, depending on what you associate with being alone). When you tell yourself that affects the way you feel, whether it makes you feel bad or good, better or worse, you are telling yourself a story.

How do feelings enter this?

Feelings are your indicator of how good a fit your story is with reality. If your story is in harmony with outer experience, with how things are, you feel great. Remember when you fell in love, and your lover could do nothing wrong? You were in love with reality, because nothing could go wrong. Remember how that could also change? How something he or she would do would be less than perfect, not fitting with how it "should" be done (because YOU know better than him, so there!) and then feelings of irritation, anger and frustration would arise? Your feelings tell you nothing more or less than how good a fit your story is with reality.

Most of us cannot function without stories. If you did Byron Katie's Work long enough, you would eventually get to the point where most stories would disappear. However, at the minimum, if you don't want to feel pain, match your story to reality.

The recipe for pain

If you want to solve pain, let's first see how to create it. This is easy for most of us - we do it so expertly we don't even have to think about it. So let's make it conscious. If you want to feel pain, disagree with reality. It doesn't matter how big or small a thing it is. Pick something around you and disagree with it.

"I wish that colleague would stop yammering so loudly at me." (Wishing someone would be other than he is - hopeless. We can't control the weather, nor the politicians, nor the boss, nor the cat. We ain't controlling the colleague.)

Keyword: wish/want

"He should buy me flowers." (Reality: He isn't. Get over it. I once had a dramatic experience of this at a Byron Katie workshop. She said, "Do I want a drink of water?" There was a glass and bottled water on the table. "Not yet. How do I know? I'm not drinking yet." Walked over. "Not yet." Opened the bottle. "Not yet." Poured water into the glass. "Not yet." Brought the glass to her mouth. "Not yet." Drank. "Now."

You want to be in perfect peace? You want what is happening NOW. Not one second before, not one second after. Why should you do it? You should or you shouldn't. This is a painless way. If you're happy with your way, no problem.)

Keyword: should

"I am angry because she didn't bring the groceries home." (Is that true? Can you absolutely know that is true? She MAY have brought them home, but someone took them. You don't know. Even if she says she didn't, you don't absolutely know. But let's say you manage to convince yourself that she didn't, in fact, bring home the groceries. Let's look at this from a clean, practical standpoint. She didn't bring the groceries home. How do you react when you think that thought? You're upset and angry. Great place to be, huh? Who would you be if you didn't have that thought? Probably a lot happier. It's NOT the fact that the groceries didn't get brought home. It's the thought that you are thinking which is messing up your peace of mind.

The underlying corollary to that is "She SHOULD have brought the groceries home." You have a story about that, whether culturally embedded or just a random story. I'm not saying she should have or should not have. I am saying if you want to think that thought, don't be surprised when the pain hits home. Because she did NOT bring the groceries home. Deal with it.)

Keyword: some action that someone did or did not take (with a "should" hiding underneath)

To sum up

You want to be happy? Align your experience to reality. Even better, forget the story and just experience reality. The sensation of your breath. The feeling of sunlight. No labelling. End of story. That's how to end pain. But if you love your story more than your peace, keep your story. Just don't be surprised when the pain hits home.

NOTE: I do not represent Byron Katie's work. The questions are hers, and the explanations are mine. It is my way of relating to them. I have a deep respect and appreciation for The Work, but I am not affiliated with them.

Tips for Precise Mental Visualisation

Source: Böhringer böhringer friedrich

There is a lot of hype about the merits of precise visualisation on the market. Whilst there are some benefits to having very precise visualisation, in most cases, excepting perhaps religious meditations, they are largely unnecessary, and may even hinder one, depending on its purpose.

That said, for those who are keen on improving the clarity of their visualisations, here are some tips:

1. Don't try too hard. When I took my first dynamic meditation training years ago, I used to come back with just about enough strength to crawl into bed. Yes, I once also coveted extremely precise visualisation. What I found was that there are two states (well, not discrete ones, but good enough for the purposes of this discussion) of mind when visualising: a rigid, forced one, and a relaxed, gentle one. The latter is much more useful for precision.

How do you know you are forcing too much? You are looking at an image in your mind and it is not staying still. Instead, the more you keep it still, the more it stubbornly morphs. That usually is an indicator that you are attempting to force and it is moving precisely because you fear it will move. That also happens when you (mentally) stare too fixedly and the image starts bringing up associations (Gee, that hat looks like an upside down glass - oh wait, what's that glass doing there?!). Actually, the associations are useful (see Tip 3).

2. When you notice a visualisation doing something it's not supposed to do, let it! Getting involved with it is exactly the way to spin it off course. Instead, ignore it and let it spin away whilst you simply relax, putting your awareness into an expanded state, rather than going into mental tunnel vision. When you feel the mind-jerk end, bring your awareness gently back to the visualisation and with the slightest touch possible (you'll get more expert over time), change it back to what it was supposed to be.

3. Use pre-wired associations. If you have trouble calling up a visualisation, or you are trying to learn a very precise visualisation, it helps to make associations. This is particularly true if you are going to be revisiting a visualisation multiple times. For example, to visualise a red ice cube (yes, yes - I know it just appeared automatically in your mind as you read that, but try KEEPING it there for a minute or two!), you may use a box-shape you know to bring up the shape, and then use an apple image to pick the colour adjustment.

4. Take breaks. In building very precise visualisations, do not try to create the whole image at once. Unless you have an exceptional mind, it will completely shift by the next time you try it. Build it slowly, and constantly deconstruct and reconstruct the visualisation from scratch. That way, you will become better and better at the earlier parts as you go, and you can builds the finer details on that foundation.

5. Make observations. Sometimes, making spatial observations may well aid your visualisation, especially when it comes to keeping it still. For example, in visualising a house, you may wish to note how wide the roof is relative to the building, how tall the door is relative to the windows, how the general arrangements of the door, windows and building make the house have a "face". Make micro and macro visualisations, and by doing this you will lock in the visualisation at a very precise level. Remember to take breaks!

Can you build a castle in the clouds?

2004: It was the final year of my Economics degree at Cambridge, and, like many of my colleagues, I was pondering my next move.

If you know me personally, you will also know that at any one time I will have my fingers in several mental experiments. At this particular point in time, it was a study of the connection between a mentally "visualised" (for want of a better word - you'll see why it wasn't the traditional visualisation in a moment) object and the probability of it being converted to reality.

And, as luck would have it, my whimsy at this time was to experience living in a castle. Not to own one, mind, but to live in one. That may rather have been inspired by an episode of Keeping Up Appearances, one suspects. So, gathering what I knew then of meditational techniques, I got on with it.

It was pointed out that "visualisation" is a very inadequate description of what I did - that would be because there was no visual at all - at least at the beginning. I simply injected the idea of living in a castle at deep brainwave levels whilst creating a sympathetic reaction with the preconscious processor. Then I left it to incubate.

After doing this for a couple of nights, ideas began to come in.

On another whimsical note, I labelled the mental association "Blandings Castle". Those who know PG Wodehouse will know that this is a fictional building in a work of fiction by the august writer. Here is another twist: At the time, I had only read Jeeves and Wooster, and not the series where this particular castle featured. In fact, I had only PhotoRead (flipped the pages of the book in front of my eyes for a grand total of maybe 2 minutes at the most) the Blandings Castle book (I forget which one it was) in the bookstore. And no, for the sceptics, there was no illustration of the castle, not even on the cover.

So, the image started to arise in my mind of a castle, over a few days. Instead of fashioning the image, I allowed it to take shape. Dimensions and outlines to the castle began to appear. I added a "porch" over the front door for cars to stop by, and most importantly a place to sit on the first floor above this porch, the better to sip lemonade from. I also went with the river behind the castle, the gym, the inside layout.

Then, I googled Blandings Castle. It seems that the chap Wodehouse has such a large following people have actually attempted to find the inspiration for Blandings. One would be Apley Hall, the building in the picture. Note the porch. Up till that point, I had never even seen a building with that design, not in Cambridge. In my self-serving arrogance, I had thought it was completely original! And I was proven seriously wrong.

About this time, fliers started appearing in my pigeonhole (that's Cambridge-speak for mailbox). One in particular was for a position as a Research Fellow at the Levy Institute of Economics. THAT flier went straight into the bin. About four times. But versions of it kept popping up at me. Finally I took a hint from the mind and went on to the meeting. It seems that I was uniquely qualified for the position due to the unusual dissertation I had produced that year. To cut a long story short, I found myself at the Institute in New York before the year was out.

Here's the Levy Institute:

Look familiar, anybody? If it doesn't, scroll up. The gym was located on the land exactly where I had imagined it to be. I always thought that it was odd it wasn't part of the building itself, but it was a College set-up, so naturally they didn't put a gym in that building. Oh, and the river would be the Hudson River, running right behind the college. The inside layout of the building checked out very nicely, too.

This was a very critical experience in the history of my development, and influenced my research for a long time to come. I think I can say that that experiment was the starting point of a completely new level of exploration of mind. Sometimes, you can build castles on clouds.

Faith, Hope and Love

Source: PatsyGC

The Bible talks about faith, hope and love. They are pathways of relating to pure awareness, the sea of awareness, of dissolving the bonds of habituated awareness, and hence the false sense of identity.

Hope is probably the least of the three. It is the inkling that there is something better, that there is something grander out there. It is daring to allow a closed mind a glimmer of an opening, so that daylight may peep through. However, it is also fraught with defensiveness, for it aspires for a better day, yet holds the sense of identity deep within itself, and when fear comes, it is easy to let hope go, to shut the door and retreat into dense ignorance.

Faith is a bigger version of hope. It is trust in the vision that hope holds out. It says, "Even though I see no evidence of anything, I still hold." The weakness of faith is that without wisdom it can be misapplied, and then it becomes stubbornness, or blind faith. And when faith goes, the separated awareness falls into despair.

Love is the greatest of them all, for it asks nothing in return. It is the adoration of pure awareness, asking for nothing, and thus gives all. There is no secret hidden price, and thus the sea of awareness is able to bestow its highest blessing, for by making themselves truly self-less, the loving meek inherit the earth.

On Controlling v Being Present for Life

As long as we are trying to control life,
we cannot be present for life.

Whenever I notice myself trying to control my life,
I will remember that it is just the fear-based mind,
and I will stop and become curious about
what is present right here and right now.

~Anon.