Thoughts, and why they're overrated

One of the most useful books I've read is a little self-help manual called You Can Be Happy Matter What, by Richard Carlson. The book was written early in Carlson's career, before he became famous for a series of bestsellers beginning with Don't Sweat the Small Stuff. The later books never appealed to me all that much, but You Can Be Happy … remains one of my favorites.

Carlson's central insight is that you are not your thoughts. His teaching is both simple and profound. He suggests that most of us have the wrong relationship to our own thinking, and that this misconstrued relationship is responsible for most of our angst, depression, worry, and unhappiness in general.

What is this relationship? It is that we think our thoughts are important, when most of the time they are not. They are just thoughts. Thoughts come and go, and it is up to us whether to grant them any importance by focusing on them, examining them, and pursuing them further, or instead to simply let them go.

Suppose you are having a perfectly ordinary day when, for no obvious reason, a thought pops into your head: I really screwed up on that blind date. Maybe the blind date happened yesterday or maybe it happened ten years ago; it doesn't matter. The usual – but wrong – response to this thought is to drill down into it. Yeah, I just can't handle blind dates. Maybe that's why I'm so bad at relationships. I just turn people off. Face it, I'm going to be alone forever.

At this point, you've turned a perfectly nice day into an exercise in self-accusation leading inevitably to a bad frame of mind – probably either anger at yourself, anger at the whole world, or depression. Whatever you were doing a minute earlier seems pointless now, and whatever you had planned to do in the next hour suddenly doesn't seem worth doing anymore. You lie down on the couch, feeling low, and naturally you continue to explore the same thoughts and memories that have brought you down, thus spiraling lower and lower.

This is how most of us behave, at least a good part of the time. We grant our thoughts too much power. We think that there's something significant about them, and that when we take notice of a thought, it must require our immediate attention. We also tend to think that analyzing a problem, worrying at it the way a dog worries at a bone, circling around it to see it from every possible vantage point, will help us to find a solution. It doesn't occur to us that we've spent countless hours analyzing this or similar problems in that way, and all it's ever gotten us is frustration and misery.

So what is the right way to react to the initial thought about the blind date gone awry? Actually, the best way is not to react to it at all. Nor is it to instantly suppress the thought, as if guiltily shoving it into a mental drawer where it can't be seen. That's only another way of giving the thought power – making it so powerful that it must be hidden away like some kind of occult talisman.

The best way is to say yourself, I don't know why I thought about that. It's not worth thinking about now. Or some words to that effect. Then just dismiss the thought and go on about your business.

Though it may be hard to believe, this really works. The subconscious is extremely suggestible, and if you tell it that a certain idea is not important or interesting and certainly not worth bringing up, then the subconscious is much less likely to bring it up again. And the more you reinforce this policy, the less likely it is that the thought will even occur to you. Your subconscious can be trained to stop bringing you things you don't want, much like dog that can be trained to stop bringing you scraps from the garbage can.

Now you might say, What if I would actually benefit from taking a good hard look at my mistakes on the blind date? How else am I going to learn? And that's a valid point. But you're not going to learn anything by an exercise in recrimination and self-abasement. You'd be better off approaching the subject neutrally, when you're in the mood to tackle it without being too hard on yourself. And you're unlikely to get much benefit out of repeating this exercise countless times. Learn what you can from your mistakes, and then close the book on that subject and move on. If your subconscious keeps nudging you to return to this topic after you've gotten what you can out of it, then simply ignore the nudges.

Carlson tells us that nearly all of our emotional and interpersonal difficulties come from granting our thoughts a power they don't deserve. He calls the spiraling nosedive of negative thinking a "thought attack," and observes that these attacks are best handled by nipping them in the bud. Take note of the first negative thought, acknowledge it (don't try to hide it or suppress it), and then simply decide not to take it seriously right now. You can even schedule a time later in the day when you might be willing to take it seriously. Most likely, when that time arrives, you won't even remember it. If you do remember it, you'll probably be sufficiently detached to be able to look at it more objectively and usefully.

From my own experience, I can say that this is a highly effective technique. It's also easy to forget. You can quickly lapse back into old habits. The imagined power of your own thoughts can exert a seductive hold on your ego, a hold difficult to break. But it can be done. It takes a kind of mindfulness, a willingness to step back and look at the thought before committing to it – I mean before committing to even taking it seriously or thinking about it further. Most of the time, once you've taken a step back, you'll find the thought is not worth your time, and you'll dismiss it as effortlessly as you would brush a mosquito off your arm.

Incidentally, this is one of the objections I have to the New Age mantra "thoughts are things." I think this gives thoughts entirely too much reality and importance. It also encourages us to suppress (or repress) our thoughts, by investing them with a fearful power that makes them dangerous to look upon. The opposite is closer to the truth: "thoughts are nothing."

There are limitations to Carlson's method. Though he insists that our happiness is entirely a matter of our own interpretation and that outside circumstances have nothing to do with it, I think some outside circumstances are so dire that no amount of mindfulness, short of the otherworldly detachment of a Zen master, could make them bearable. If you're a prisoner in a concentration camp or the captive of a serial killer, your happiness is really not in your own control. But most of us, thankfully, are not likely to find ourselves in those circumstances. For the ordinary ups and downs of everyday life, the frictions and frustrations, the arguments and disappointments, Carlson's approach works extraordinarily well.

It also has a certain relevance to the whole question of the nature of consciousness. If we are not our thoughts, then what are we? Evidently we are the mind that looks at our thoughts and either investigates them or shoos them away. Which means we are something like "the witness" who habitually stands back from our thoughts and actions, observing and sometimes judging in an impersonal way.

Perhaps it is the witness who is fully real and accounts for the continuity of consciousness that persists across many changes of mind – changes of opinion, changes of knowledge, changes of mood, changes of psychological maturity, etc. When we regard ourselves as essentially the same person we were at the age of six, maybe what we are acknowledging is the persistence of the witness, the observer who is outside the ego with its changeable nature, its endless conflicts, its Sturm und Drang. We are the eye of the storm, and the I in the storm.

And when we get caught up in petty quarrels, ego-based rivalries, and counterproductive obsessions, we're forgetting our essential nature as the witness and becoming ensnared in a briar patch of thoughts that ultimately have no reality at all. We're like a spider that gets stuck in its own web.

At this point we've gotten a little bit away from Richard Carlson's book, so let me circle back to it by saying that my summary of his views is necessarily incomplete and, in itself, probably not very helpful. If it interests you, I suggest reading the whole thing. It's not a long or difficult read, and you just may find it helpful. I know I have.

Comments

[Juan]

"I've already read Keith Augustine's long online essay on NDEs, and although it's well researched, I found it tendentious and unconvincing."

You could write a post about that.

[Michael Prescott]

"You could write a post about that."

Already did, back in 2006:

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2006/08/ndes_and_their_.html

[Julie Baxter]

Matt writes:

"But this is what the Skeptics do; they have to. Because acknowledging *any single* phenomenon means ripping up their worldview and their community and starting from scratch."

It's a bugger to find you've spent your life digging a hole in the wrong place, isn't it? ;)

[Juan]

"As a general rule, if people report things that seem to be impossible decade after decade and especially around the world, they are happening."

But skeptics tend not deny the existence of the experience, but they give other interpretations. They do not deny the existence of near death experiences, but they deny that NDEs are glimpses of afterlife, they do not deny the existence of experiences of apparitions, but they deny that the apparitions are spirits of the deceased, etc.

However, there are reasons to reject these negations: even though there NDEs whose content was not matched by the consensual reality and could be hallucinatory, there is also NDEs with content that corresponded with the consensual reality and could not reasonably be obtained by known senses or luck, there are cases where the apparitions were seen by several witnesses and other cases where the apparitions provided information that the witness did not know, etc., which points to the existence of spirits of deceased.

[Amos Oliver Doyle]

Well, Juan, one always has to be cognizant of the 'will to believe'. There is more going on in the human psyche than we know. I have read a lot of the 'evidence' for spirits of the deceased but most of those reports came through the mind of man, that is, most or all of it is anecdotal. Increasing, I question more and more everything that I read, hear or see.

After sifting through most of the 'evidence' for many years, I still believe that the 'evidence' in the Patience Worth case is the most convincing.

I agree with Matt that something definitely is going on. It's just that based on the 'evidence' I still don't know what it really is. - AOD

[Matt Rouge]

Julie wrote,

||It's a bugger to find you've spent your life digging a hole in the wrong place, isn't it? ;)||

Yes. There is a lot of psychological inertia behind a position long-held. This is true of anyone with belief system that is dogmatic and passionately felt.

Juan wrote,

||But skeptics tend not deny the existence of the experience, but they give other interpretations.||

They do when they need to. They will accuse people of outright lying when they can't come up with any other explanation.

Consider this: acknowledging the existence of the experience is nothing more than acknowledging the report. If Skeptics didn't acknowledge what people are talking about, they wouldn't be "in business," so to speak. They *enjoy* acknowledging--and then trashing--people's experiences. OTOH, there are a lot of what I call "soft atheists" who really do just ignore things that don't fit their worldview. They are not contentious.

[Julie Baxter]

I commented recently, in another thread, about a chance entry I found in the so called 'RationalWiki' concerning Robert McLuhan while I was googling his blog. Frankly, I was shocked by the tone of what I read.

The adjectives used were those of the dim-witted playground bully taunting the fine minded scholar. And yet, at the same time, it was strangely reassuring in that anyone of a more reasonable mentality can see, at a glance, the motivation and intellectual insecurity behind such puerile character assassination. The contrast between the Robert I know and the description of him and his work in that entry was almost surreal.

It saddens me to see this most important avenue of scientific enquiry deliberately ridiculed and trivialised by buffoons who write as if they're teenagers singing, "La, la, la, la, la," at the top of their voices in order not to hear. Perhaps they are all teenagers? They certainly appear to be at a difficult stage of their mental development.

Clearly, I don't understand these people, just as I don't understand playground bullies. That kind of mentality is something that the human race should have evolved beyond by now. But then things do have a way of descending to the lowest common denominator - which 'RationalWiki', an oxymoron if ever there was one, surely represents.

[Juan]

"I agree with Matt that something definitely is going on. It's just that based on the 'evidence' I still don't know what it really is."

But that is not enough, because the question is to find out what happens, and this blog have shown that there are reasons to favor a afterlife interpretation of certain experiences. And it is not enought accept that some experiences ocurrs, it can be considered as hallucinatory, which does not deny the experience.

[Amos Oliver Doyle]

Juan,
I am convinced without any doubt that some people believe that they have experienced seemingly other-world realities during a so-called near death experience (NDE) or an out-of-body experience (OBE). I believe that those experiences were very personal in content to them and often related to the individual's current life and cultural situation. I think that what is reported by perhaps 100s if not 1,000s of people during an NDE or OBE seems to be very similar, not always in specifics but in overview. What they report seems reasonable to me and what I personally would expect if I accept that there is a meaningful, loving, intent to this life and to a life to come in a non-physical reality but that view is based upon my biases, hopes, fears and a developing belief system in which I have invested a good amount of time and energy. While what is reported may not be factual, the fact that it was reported, I think, has to be believed.

These reported experiences may be different for different people, not that that negates another reality but that a non-physical reality may have a certain fluidity that we do not experience in a physical existence and that an individual entity or consciousness may be able to manipulate that fluidity by some means or that that fluidity may be manipulated by some other entities.

One may believe that these reported experiences are not enough, as you say, but I think that is all that is really known---that is all the evidence there is. There is currently no way that one can know whether or not those NDE or OBE experiences were hallucinatory or not. This is not to dismiss the veridical facts related to an individual case but I have to accept and believe however that whoever verifies the facts is not making the facts fit the NDE or OBE experience.

I think that it is unlikely that hard evidence of a 'spiritual reality' will ever be found because a spiritual reality is spiritual not physical. That is why photographs of spirits and materializations of the dead and ectoplasm are difficult for me to accept as evidence of a spiritual reality. I think for the most part they are evidence of fakery and play into a person's "will to believe", mass hypnosis or personal needs, e.g. self delusion to assuage a fear of death, loss of a loved one or in the case of a medium, a need, either consciously or subconsciously for notoriety.

If everything that is reported in an NDE or OBE as evidence of an after-life existence is a true representation of a reality, then I would agree that there are good reasons to favor it. But I personally do not trust that what people say is reliable or represents another reality in which we all shall enter.

There are other things which I think are better examples of an after life than OBEs and NDEs. First and foremost I tend to think that the reports of reincarnation, especially in children are very convincing. Studies by Ian Stevenson and more recent reports e.g., James Leininger, have provided verifiable information that a person reported to have been a past life of the child, really existed. And it is highly unlikely that either the child or his family knew about the past life personality before the child reported it. However Stevenson agrees that hypnotic regressions of adults to past lives may not provide the best examples of reincarnation.

I personally believe that the Patience Worth case deserves better evaluation than it has received, excepting Dr. Walter Franklin Prince's case study in 1926-27. Dr. Prince was not a gullible man and he had a reputation for detecting fraud but at the end of his study of Pearl Curran and Patience Worth he was as perplexed as anyone as to the true explanation of Patience Worth. Patience Worth is not a simple case to evaluate as it requires reading voluminous materials written by Curran and Worth as well as Prince's study which included interviews with Curran and many people who knew her and one must have more that a basic knowledge of history and philology. Maybe it is a case of reincarnation in which Pearl Curran pulled information from her over-soul to write about societies and cultures existing over a 2,000-year period but I don't think that Curran fabricated anything either consciously or subconsciously. I don't think, based primarily upon Prince's study that she was a fraud in any way. - AOD

[Juan]

Largely I agree with you, Amos; what I meant is that it is not enough to say that something happens, but find out what happens.

"I think that it is unlikely that hard evidence of a 'spiritual reality' will ever be found because a spiritual reality is spiritual not physical."

But what is spiritual? NDEs, apparitions, mediumship and children who remember their past lives may be manifestations of consciousness according to a physics that we are just beginning to understand. I mean, I think that the spiritual is physical, only advance to modern physics.