Exploring Your Mind—Part 1

Zazen

Think about your thoughts. In many cases, they were voluntary, in the sense that you consciously chose to have them. As a result of repeatedly being asked for your opinion about an ongoing political scandal, for example, you might have decided to invest the time and effort necessary to come up with a considered opinion. Alternatively, you might have set aside time to do research on how to invest your retirement savings.

This can’t be said, however, of most of your thoughts. You don’t summon them; they just drift into your mind, uninvited. Because this phenomenon is commonplace, you are oblivious to it, the way you are oblivious to your breathing—unless someone calls your attention to it.

One way to gain insight into your thought processes is by doing an updated, simplified version of what is known as a zazen meditation. It has many variants, but for our purposes, here’s what you need to do. Sit comfortably in an environment with few distracting noises. You can sit on the ground, but a chair is fine, as is a sofa. Set a timer for three minutes and close your eyes. During those minutes, relax your mind, but let me explain what this will entail.

If I asked you to relax your hand, you would know what to do: Let it go limp, at which point it would be motionless. You would not, in particular, make it motionless by tensing every muscle in it. That would require physical effort on your part, and I want you to do the opposite: make it motionless by relaxing all its muscles.

Along similar lines, in asking you to relax your mind, I am not asking you to make a conscious effort not to think. That, after all, would require thinking! In particular, if you spend the three minutes of the exercise repeating the mantra “Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think,” you will have failed miserably.

Having said this, I should add that your mind will be present during the zazen exercise, but to the extent possible, it will be limited to playing the role of observer: On detecting a thought, it will make a mental note of it, after which it will dismiss the thought in question.

Lots of readers, I suspect, will be disinclined to do the exercise I have described. This is because they will assume first, that the exercise will be easy to do, and second, that there is nothing to be gained from doing it. Conclusion: doing the exercise would be a waste of their time. This, at any rate, was apparently what some of my students assumed when I assigned a zazen meditation as homework. In our next class meeting, I would call on students to ask whether they had done their homework and what their experience had been. When a student told me that yes, he had done his homework but that not much had happened, other than that his mind had gone blank, I knew that he was either a remarkable individual or—much more likely—that he hadn’t done his homework.

When I first encountered the zazen exercise in the early 2000s, I myself was reluctant to do it. I’m glad I overcame this reluctance, though. I learned a lot by doing it; indeed, there is a good chance that if I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t be writing this substack.

I will have more to say about the zazen exercise in my next post, but for now I want you to do the exercise. It will require only three minutes of your time, as well as zero physical effort. And who knows, you might gain important insights into the workings of your mind!