Thinking and Habits ~ Ajahn Sumedho

Thinking and Habits
~ Ajahn Sumedho - The Sound of Silence, pp.223-235

A question has been asked: How does the reflecting mind differ from the thinking mind that we identify with? We are conditioned to think, to use logic and reason – thinking becomes habitual. Mindfulness does not operate out of habit but through awareness; otherwise it is ignorance. Avijjā, viññāṇa, and papañca are the Pali terms. Avijjā is ignorance, viññāṇa is consciousness, and papañca is conceptual proliferation. So this is the momentum of habits. When we are caught in papañca, we wander around unquestioningly in the momentum of thoughts that are stimulated by memories or impingements. In Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, we read how a taste of a piece of cake and tea can set off a chain of remembered events. So that is papañca. And then we use thought to reason things out – logic. Thought is very useful; thinking is a good tool, I have found.

We are educated to think and to acquire knowledge from books and from lectures. This is the information age, an age of computers and websites and everything. There is a plethora of information at your fingertips. I just ask my secretary a question, ‘Do you know if …?’ and he looks it up on the website and gives me all the details. You don’t even have to go to the library anymore. We are educated to think like that.

So reason and logic have a certain value in the worldly life, but papañca is often what takes us to depression, anxiety, or worry. Some habits of the mind, like thinking of the future: What’s going to happen to me? To modify the Beatles song: ‘Will you still feed me, will you still need me, when I’m seventy-four?’ Or regret, guilt, remorse, about things you have said or done in the past. So you can see how the ego is built around this idea of ‘me and mine,’ and around time and the past and future. This is a trap. One gets caught into it, and it always leads to dukkha. Avijjā, ignorance, is suffering.

Suffering is not the pain in your knees. It’s the aversion to the pain, because this realm is like this. Pain is a part of the experience – physical pain and disease, old age, sickness, death, loss of what is loved, grief, sorrow, despair, anguish – and this is not depressing. I mean, these are all variable experiences. We learn from this as humans, and in a human lifetime we have to experience the loss of loved ones, separation. We have this monastic reflection: ‘All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become otherwise, will become separated from me.’ In monasticism we have ways of reflecting on these events. It can be quite depressing when you think about it on a personal level: all that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become otherwise, will become separated from me. If I think about that, proliferate on that, I might as well just kill myself right now, get it over with. But then in terms of Dhamma, we are looking, knowing the world as the world. This is what being born is all about.

Being born in a mortal, sensitive form in a sense-realm on planet Earth with its earth, fire, water, and wind elements; being conscious, being sensitive – these are endurable and bearable, but what we can’t bear is our own ignorance. So I’ve watched myself many times. When I first went to live with Ajahn Chah I couldn’t understand the language, and then he’d give desanās (Dhamma talks) in the Isahn dialect of North East Thailand for sometimes up to five hours in the evening. And I’d say, ‘Well, I don’t see any point in me coming to these. I’m being reasonable,  because I don’t understand the language and I just suffer a lot – the pain in those legs – and it’s just a miserable experience.’ And he’d say, ‘You still have to come.’ He was being unreasonable, I felt.

So then I was sitting there in the polite posture with one leg folded in front … When you listen to a desanā, you have to sit like this according to Thai etiquette. For someone who has never sat in that posture before it’s pretty excruciating after about three minutes, and for five hours! My mind would say, ‘I can’t stand this, I’ve had enough, it’s not fair, I’m leaving, I can’t take it,’ and then I found out that I could. The mind was screaming away, but by watching, observing, I found I had quite an ability to bear pain, physical discomfort, disease, loss, broken heart, disappointment, disillusionment, criticism, and blame, where on a personal level I’d think that I just couldn’t bear it, that I’d be shattered and destroyed. But before there was a lot of fear and anxiety about losing what I wanted, or things not going my way. I was worried and anxious about almost everything. On that level of conceptual proliferation, papañca, it just goes on like that, and my mind says, ‘I
can’t stand it, I’ve had enough, I’m fed up.’

When you say, ‘I’m fed up,’ sometimes you say it with great force. I knew one monk who, whenever he said he was fed up, would say it in way that just pierced my heart. Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘I’m fed up,’ but when I saw I could bear it, I recognized that I couldn’t trust this papañca. The rational mind, the critical mind, as I’ve been saying many times, the inner critic, the superego, the tyrant, the ‘jackal’ as they call it in Nonviolent Communication training, is always criticizing me. So no matter how good or how careful I try to be, the jackal is always saying, ‘You know ...’. People could praise me, ‘You are a great teacher, your talk was so wonderful’ and all that, but the inner jackal would say, ‘You know it’s not true.’ So I realized that even if I could attain all the titles and accolades, it wouldn’t make much difference because the inner jackal would still go on. So how could I trust such a thing? Is that trustworthy, the inner jackal? Is that something I should give attention to and believe in, or is it just a habit of papañca?

By reflecting on these forces – this self-critic, this very righteous know-it-all authority inside me, the big judge, the inner tyrant – I no longer gave them any further reinforcement. It’s like noting something and reflecting on it. Now, when you reflect on this very rational critical force, it may seem intelligent. And if you were brought up in a family that tends to be critical – where you could never express praise or affirmation of someone’s goodness because that would inflate his or her ego – honesty always meant admitting your faults. So if you were praised too much, or thought too well of yourself, you were conceited; and having an inflated ego, a big head, was a danger. English culture is very much like that, isn’t it? Boasting or bragging or telling anybody how good you are is really despised. But every English person is willing to tell you about his or her faults. This is a cultural problem.

In Thailand, for example, they often think of all the good things they have done. Ajahn Chah told me to reflect on my own goodness, to think of all the good things; and I found that quite difficult. I could write pages about my faults, but I couldn’t get very much going when I tried thinking of my goodness. Yet on reflection I can say I’m a good person, and I love the good. I don’t have strong criminal tendencies or love to torture, steal, lie, and insult. I’m not a psychopath. I’ve never had any criminal tendencies. I’ve never enjoyed harming other things, never got any pleasure out of cruelty or intentional harming. I then began to see that basically I’m very good. Otherwise why would I be a monk all these years? Buddhist monasticism is not the place to be bad. It’s not a lifestyle where you can get a full range of evil actions.

So reflecting, using thought for reflection, like taking just the first Noble Truth, dukkha (suffering). So you think dukkha, first Noble Truth – that is a thought. But you are taking a thought and then reflecting on dukkha. This is not through the intellect, like trying to find the perfect English definition for dukkha, as many monks try to do, endlessly. Searching for the perfect English equivalent for the Pali word dukkha, I’m tired of that. I’m no longer interested on that level because it doesn’t matter. ‘Suffering’: good enough. It gets the point across. So then you look at that. What does that really mean in terms of what is happening to me now? I began to notice there is anxiety, self-consciousness, worry about what other people think of me, worry about making a mistake, doing something wrong. The mind would say, ‘I can’t stand any more of this, I’ve had enough, I’m going to leave.’ That is starting to look at a lot of this conceptual proliferation, the inner tyrant that says, ‘You shouldn’t have thoughts like that. That thought was bad and you shouldn’t think negative thoughts.’

I could see that getting caught in these habits led me to suffer from anxiety, worry, and self-consciousness. I’ve had quite a good life, I don’t have a lot to complain about. I wasn’t born in poverty, to cruel parents, or in an inhumane society, and I wasn’t persecuted, deprived, or abused. In spite of all that, the suffering was unbearable. So by the time I was thirty I felt like a burnt-out case. I felt weary. The worldly life had no promise for me. I could, if I wanted to, get a good job and do all the right things according to my parents’ wishes, but there was no interest, nothing in me that moved me towards that kind of ambition.

The life that I was born into bored me. I couldn’t bear to live the kind of life my parents lived because it was boring to me, just to spend my life making money and having a family. It certainly was not tantalizing to me. This world-weariness is called nibbidā in Pali. This isn’t depression or self-pity; it’s weariness. Even at thirty I had seen enough of the world, had enough experience. And so the only thing left was to become a monk. So then the door of opportunity opened and I became a Buddhist monk.

In the monastic life in Thailand with Ajahn Chah, the Buddhist meditation was about developing this reflective capacity, but not just ‘me thinking about myself.’ It gave me this perspective, these tools that I’ve been sharing with you, how to use the Four Noble Truths. And so my reflective mind began to notice the anger. I used to feel anger and then somebody would say, ‘You are angry,’ and I would say, ‘No I’m not.’ I could be in the midst of anger and never know it or admit it – I was that blind. Or I didn’t know how to admit I didn’t know how I felt about anything. So people would say, ‘How do you feel about this?’ and I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I felt about anything, because I had operated in a different way. Rather than through being sensitive or admitting what I was feeling, I was always trying to become something, to live up to standards, or operating habitually. So I had to really observe feeling when I became a monk staying with Ajahn Chah.

I had to observe the restlessness, anger, and resentment about having to sit for five hours listening to Luang Por Chah rattling on and everybody having a good time. He was very charming and entertaining, and people were mesmerized and laughing. He had a good sense of humour and I would sit there angry and furious. Reflecting on that fury, I began to notice this little boy, this little immature child saying, ‘I’m going to run away. I’m going to really hurt you, Luang Por Chah, because I am leaving.’ And then I started reflecting on that – I remember doing that to my mother. When she didn’t give me what I wanted, I used to say, ‘I’m going to go,’ hoping that she’d say, ‘Oh, don’t go, I’ll do anything you want.’ I was listening to these voices, because there was nothing else to do. Monastic life isn’t exciting or adventurous. It’s a simplification, so you’re just basically living the routine life of a Buddhist monk. You chant, you can’t even sing; but the chanting was boring. I used to like Italian opera, so my mind was off thinking of arias, emotional fortes, and whatnot.

Still, I was very interested in developing this reflective way of living, and the life there freed me from having to make a living and getting caught up in a foolish society that I was already disillusioned with. At least I was with like-minded people and with a very good, very wise teacher. I was really very fortunate. Then living in relationship with the other monks and the laypeople was very prescribed according to Vinaya, the monastic discipline, and Thai cultural tradition. So I just adapted. I could be critical of all that, but then I decided that wasn’t what I was interested in, on that conventional level. Instead I learned what the cause of suffering is and how to liberate myself from that. That’s the main thrust. The intention is to realize nibbāna and not make a big deal about the world around you.

The monastic environment is moral. There is a strong sense of morality and non-violence and of living with good people and a wise teacher. There was the Dhamma and the Vinaya. So I decided I wasn’t going to spend my time complaining about it. The Vinaya has all these little rules, and personally I don’t like rules at all. I don’t like these fussy little things and I used to feel such aversion when they started reading the Vinaya: ‘I’m going to fall asleep.’ And they read the Vinaya every morning – this was before I understood Thai – for maybe half an hour. Sometimes a monk who loved reading commentaries on the Vinaya would get so absorbed he’d go on for an hour and everybody would fall asleep. We’d all be asleep and he wouldn’t even notice. I’d sit there and fulminate: ‘This is a waste of time. The monks aren’t even paying attention. What a stupid thing to be doing.’

Then I would reflect on my state of mind, my critical mind, my resentment. That was what I was interested in, not in trying to set the monastery right but just learning from the experiences I was having. I began to see that really I could bear all that. What I couldn’t bear was this grumbling, complaining, critical me that kept whining, ‘This is a waste of time, this is stupid, you don’t have to do it like this.’ That was the first Noble Truth, the dukkha. I wasn’t there to try to arrange life according to my wishes. I had deliberately put myself in that situation, under somebody else; I knew I needed to be under a teacher. I needed to learn how to obey, how to follow a form. I had been too much the free spirit doing everything to manipulate life and get my own way. I was good at that. And I could have done that easily as a Buddhist monk – at some monasteries, a big guy like me can intimidate, come on strong, and they offered all kinds of cushy monasteries to stay in. Instead I chose this place in Ubon, a remote part of Thailand, that was considered the Parris Island of Buddhist monasteries. Parris Island is a Marine training camp in the United States.

I learned a lot just from watching myself. As I began to understand Thai, I’d hear Luang Por Chah use this phrase poo roo (the knowing one) a lot. I had the Western mindset that nibbāna and liberation meant just getting rid of everything. That was my cultural habit and the easiest way for me to interpret Pali scripture. It even says in paṭiccasamuppāda (dependent origination) on the nirodha side of it, where your consciousness ceases, and everything ceases, and that sounds like total annihilation. That was how my logical mind worked when I tried to understand the Pali teachings from a Western perspective. Luang Por Chah would use Pali terms like kāmasukhallikānuyoga and attakilamathānuyoga. I looked up these Pali words and also majjhimā paṭipadā, the Middle Way. They come from the Buddha’s first sermon, the Dhammacakka Sutta, a teaching on the Four Noble Truths, which we chanted and had to memorize.

Kāmasukhallikānuyoga is a sort of eternalism of happiness, or a belief in heaven or something on that level, where you are feeling happy forever; attakilamathānuyoga is annihilationism – everything just ceases into a void of nothingness and oblivion. Now these are logical sequences of the thinking mind, like heaven or a kind of eternal heavenly experience. I was brought up Christian, to think I had a separate soul and that if I did what God wanted then when I died I would go as a separate soul to live forever with Jesus up in heaven.That’s the Christian model I had. In that model, if you failed at your attempts and you didn’t please God, you got sent to the opposite, to hell, where you experienced unmitigated misery forever. That’s pretty severe, a very threatening situation, isn’t it? And yet intuitively I couldn’t really go along with that. Something in me couldn’t believe in that. So I tended more towards annihilationism. I liked the idea of oblivion, of disappearing, of vanishing. I just wanted to be invisible and disappear. That was more appealing than the other. So thenthe majjhimā paṭipadā, the Middle Way: what is that? That is a kind of compromise between the two. Then I began, through meditation, through reflection, to recognize mindfulness as transcending thoughts. Using the gap between the words, the self-questioning style – Who am I? Who is letting go? Who is the Buddho? What is it that knows? And asking myself questions where the mind stops thinking. When you ask yourself a question, for a moment, there is no thought. For example, the question ‘who am I?’ might be answered with ‘Sumedho.’ I knew that already, so I wasn’t interested in that as an answer, so who am I? It’s nonplussing. The thinking mind stops. And just reflecting on the gaps between thoughts gave me insight into the space around things in my mind.

I started reflecting on space, just my visual space. For example, in the monastery I would be sitting together with the other monks and I’d say here’s Ajahn So-and-so and there’s Ajahn So-and-so, and I’d get to see them all through their names and through my memories of them as people: he’s like this and he’s like that. Then I started to reflect on the spaces between the monks, as a practice of exploring instead of
just going along. I’d notice the spaces between the monks who were doing evening puja. This is a different way of looking at something, reflecting on space rather than going along with the convention of this monk’s name is this and he’s like this and so forth. This is a way of experimenting, investigating reality, noticing the way it is – using space as a reference rather than obsessing about forms, names, and
personal reactions.

I then began to notice that after reflecting on space I felt spacious. Space has no boundaries so it’s different than ‘I like this monk, I don’t like that one; this is a good monk, that one is not; I’m senior to this one, that one is senior to me; this monk eats silently, that one makes too much noise.’ When you are living together you really irritate each other a lot, so this was a way of investigating, here and now, in our ordinary monastic life with Ajahn Chah. I was reflecting on experience rather than whining about it, ignoring it, judging it, or rationalizing it. I was taking the Buddha’s teachings and then applying them to the moment. I never saw the Buddha’s teachings as theoretical or as ideals about how things should be. I saw them as pointing to something as ordinary as dukkha, its causes, its cessation, and the way of nonsuffering. So this is all about here and now. It’s not about me trying to become enlightened in the future.

As for my notion of practising hard so I would become enlightened, I changed that to the question ‘What is enlightenment?’ Because it is a theory, isn’t it? When Kondañña understood the DhammacakkaSutta, the world shook and maybe earthquakes were expected. Or is enlightenment our true nature? Is it simply mindfulness? And ‘enlightenment’ is sometimes compared to a blinding flash, so bright you can’t see afterward. That kind of light is too much for the eyes, but if you get the right light then you can see everything properly. What I was interested in was not being blinded by light but being able to see clearly, to know in clarity, not to be caught in endless doubt, in sceptical problems I created through habitual thinking and conceptual proliferation. So that is about here and now.

The Buddha is always pointing to the here and now; sandiṭṭhiko (apparent here and now), akāliko (timeless), ehipassiko (encouraging investigation), opanayiko (leading inwards), paccattaṁ veditabbo viññūhi (to be experienced individually by the wise), the Dhamma teachings, what Dhamma is. In monastic life you attach to a lot of things and you suffer from that. My habit of attaching was strong. I could quite easily give up all the worldly stuff, but I found I was getting obsessed with all kinds of silly things in monastic life. I was suffering because I always was wanting or idealizing something: wanting monasteries to be different, not wanting certain monks to be the way they are, or just thinking that it was all a waste of time. So it brought up arrogance, conceit, opinions, views, and obsessions. The sensual delights were very limited at Wat Pah Pong; we were strictly celibate, of course, and we had only one meal a day. Here we have chocolate every day, so this is a luxury hotel by comparison.

One of the things that the Buddha allowed in the Vinaya is sugar in the evenings. I was never that keen on sweets, but suddenly I was obsessed about sugar. So I went on a fast. Ajahn Chah gave me permission to fast for a week. Then in the middle of the fast he gave me a bag of sugar. I took it back to my kuti, and I couldn’t help myself. I took one taste and it tasted so fantastic that I ate the whole bag. I couldn’t stop, just totally gave in, and then spent time meditating about how I was going to get more. Then I thought that this was ridiculous, because my critical mind was looking down on this stupid and despicable behaviour. Then you don’t want anyone to find out that you are spending the whole hour thinking about how you are going to get the sugar. But I began to see that all the sense pleasures that I had as a layperson were a kind of energy fix on what was sensually pleasurable, and so sugar was happiness. So I just observed this mad, driven obsession, rather than trying to suppress it because I didn’t like it; this is what was happening. The suffering around being obsessed about something you know is ridiculous, and you know that eating sugar is not very good for you, yet it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. So you keep observing this instead of trying to control it. You do not try to get rid of this obsession for sweets, but you see it in terms of the first Noble Truth.

Once the thinking process starts, the possibility, the anticipation and so forth, it keeps going. Getting to understand how your mind works – the space between the thoughts, the silence, the sound of silence – stops the thinking process. So this is reflecting on nonthinking. I do not proliferate about non-thinking, but I think and observe in the stillness; and I see that stillness is like this. Now those are thoughts, but it’s a reflective thinking. It’s not a rational sequence, and it’s not habitual thinking. And then I ask myself questions in this stillness: Is there any self? Can I find a self in this? And so just by asking myself these questions, I listen, and in this stillness of the sound of silence there is certainly awareness, intelligence, consciousness, but I can’t find any self in it. And that is intuitive awareness. I really can’t find any self. So then I notice how I create myself by thinking about myself, about what I like and don’t like, and how I get into my critical judgemental phase with my views and opinions. I can become a very strong personality, fed up easily, and quick to move into conceit or self disparagement and on.

All these habits come about through conceptual proliferation, papañca. But then, being able to recognize the difference between awareness and consciousness, and ignorance and consciousness. My consciousness is affected by all these proliferating thoughts connected to ‘me and mine’: I don’t like this or approve of that; I don’t want to do this and don’t see the point; you shouldn’t have said that; I like this monk but not that one. This is all avijjā paccayā saṅkhārā (ignorance conditions mental formations). The conscious experience is one of suffering, because the self isn’t peaceful, is not real, and changes according to conditions. Depending on whether you are praised, appreciated, and liked or you are criticized, despised, and rejected, the proliferations are different, but the awareness is the same. So just by reflecting on the way it is, you see what the refuge is. You can’t trust the other. I can’t trust my proliferating habits; they lie all the time. The inner tyrant, the jackal, just says the same bloody thing over and over. Now there is no way that I am going to appease the jackal. No matter how good I am it will never say, ‘You are really good, Sumedho.’ It will always say, ‘You think you are so good, don’t you, but you are not.’ So you can’t win on that level, there is no way out, because it is a habit; it doesn’t have any life of its own. That is all it knows how to do. It doesn’t know how to praise or appreciate anything or reflect; it just knows how to make life miserable. So will you trust that? I won’t.

So the refuge is in the Buddha, in this awareness. Through investigation I trust it. I’ve tested it out and explored it for many years to make sure. The experiences of my life are part of this way of learning, because the experiences change and things happen in unexpected or even unwanted ways. The refuge remains the same, whereas conditions are dependent on other conditions that you have no control over. So I leave you to your Buddho.

https://cdn.amaravati.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Ajahn-Sumedho-Volume-4-The-Sound-of-Silence.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2axkYjywrNLhqISmrmHlQIh-bymKqGElyJFSy13XWyN3XD__EpugO7uoQ