Today, with the arrival of the 25th of March 2018 and the coming of BST, I have awoken to the departure (or better, dethronement) of another old ‘friend’, the resurgent and insistent ‘thinker’.
For many years ‘I’1 have attempted to first, gain awareness of, and then, break the continuity of the self-referential internal dialogue. It’s the internal voice of self-commentary. It’s secondary, and it’s false in its claims to be primary. I had used to call it, after the practice of many others, ‘the thinker’, but have stopped doing that… more on that elsewhere.
With the loss of, or self-destruction of, or implosion of, the central ‘I-self’2, that continuous narrative that there is a self; it was seen that a lot of freedom from the impositions of ‘the thinker’ arrived at the same time. It was easy– well, easier– to throw off ‘the thinker’.
As described previously, it has been much easier to shift attention from thought to the now-continuously-available sensation of the sensory body. Still, however, when at rest, the thinker would often start up.
Just to describe this, the thinker is triggered mostly by images, often by reference to memories of emotional events that relate to images, and sometimes by similarities in circumstances.
But today, there’s a wonderfully echoing silence here. The same silence that was first encountered, briefly but life-changing-ly, over 30 years ago.
‘The thinker’ is not gone. But it’s stopped yacking, for now at least.
Oh, ‘I’ have a vacation! I’m vacant!