What exactly do you mean by “watching the thinker”?
When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my
head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is
that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several
voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes
that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous
monologues or dialogues.
You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly
talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different
from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t
do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares,
complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily
relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be
reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible
future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and
negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is
accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is
relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the
past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind,
which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective
cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present
through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is
not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many
people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks
and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of
untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.
The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is
the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start
listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular
attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone
records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years.
This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way
of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing
presence.
When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say,
do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so
would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back
door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to
it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence,
is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the
thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new
dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought,
you feel a conscious presence — your deeper self — behind or
underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power
over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing
the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the
end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the
mental stream — a gap of “no-mind.” At first, the gaps will be short, a
few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When
these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you.
This is the beginning of your natural state of felt oneness with Being,
which is usually obscured by the mind. With practice, the sense of
stillness and peace will deepen. In fact, there is no end to its depth.
You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within:
the joy of Being.
It is not a trancelike state. Not at all. There is no loss of
consciousness here. The opposite is the case. If the price of peace
were a lowering of your consciousness, and the price of stillness a lack
of vitality and alertness, then they would not be worth having. In this
state of inner connectedness, you are much more alert, more awake
than in the mind-identified state. You are fully present. It also raises
the vibrational frequency of the energy field that gives life to the
physical body.
As you go more deeply into this realm of no-mind, as it is sometimes
called in the East, you realize the state of pure consciousness. In that
state, you feel your own presence with such intensity and such joy
that all thinking, all emotions, your physical body, as well as the
whole external world become relatively insignificant in comparison to
it. And yet this is not a selfish but a selfless state. It takes you beyond
what you previously thought of as “your self.” That presence is
essentially you and at the same time inconceivably greater than you.
What I am trying to convey here may sound paradoxical or even
contradictory, but there is no other way that I can express it.
Instead of “watching the thinker,” you can also create a gap in the
mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the
Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is
a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness
away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are
highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of
meditation.
In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine
activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your
fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. For example,
every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of
work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your
breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, pay
attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the
sound and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent
of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you close
the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your
breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence.
There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success
in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within.
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is
this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap
in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as
you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no
longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense
of self does not depend on it.