Disinteresting Thoughts

As you close your eyes and focus on the breath, try to keep your thinking aimed at the breath. The problem, of course, is that there will be other thoughts coming into the mind. Sometimes we try to chase them away, but as Ajaan Lee says, it’s like chasing a shadow. The more you chase it, the more it runs away from you, pulling you away from where you want to be.

So. Just ignore the thoughts. They can go flashing out, but you don’t have to go with them.

Our problem is that we find our thoughts too interesting, like that little girl: There was a Swiss psychologist who studied child development, so he decided to keep a diary of his own daughter’s development. There was a stage in her life where, when she went to the bathroom, she wouldn’t let her mother flush the toilet until she had made up a story about the little pieces that were floating there in the water.

So. Try to have the attitude toward your own thoughts that they’re just little pieces floating in the water. Try to pull out from them, see that they’re not quite as interesting as you thought. You’ve got better work to do.

I knew a writer one time who, when he’d written something, would read it aloud to himself with a sarcastic, sing-song voice. If he could keep up that sarcastic voice for quite a while into the piece, he knew the piece was garbage and he would throw it away. But if he couldn’t maintain that tone of voice, he knew he had something valuable.

So for the time being, any thought that doesn’t have to do with the breath, approach it in a sarcastic way: Now you’re thinking that again. There you go again. That helps to pull you out, because the fact that you’re interested in your thoughts is what feeds them—like stray dogs coming around. If you feed them, they’ll keep on coming around. If you don’t pay any attention to your thoughts, after a while they don’t come around anymore, just like dogs. If you stop feeding them, they’ll come around for a while and they’ll whine and they’ll complain. But after a while, when they see they can’t get anything out of you, then they’ll go.

So try not to be interested in your thoughts. Be more interested in the breath, because there’s a lot going on here. It’s not just in and out. There are all the different breath energies in the body and all the different ways you can play with them to create a sense of well-being in the body right now—to alleviate any illnesses you might have that have to do with the breath energy—and to master a new skill: the skill of staying still and being satisfied with staying still. That’s an important skill to master, because otherwise you’re always trying to feed off of new things, new things, new things. And just because they’re new doesn’t mean they’re better. You’ve got something good here already.

So don’t give in to that fear of missing out. Have a fear of missing out on the present moment, because there’s a lot going on here, a lot you need to understand, and a lot you can change to make this an even better and more interesting place to be.