...to what I could see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. I didn't know that my "problem" was incessant thought, but I had no peace of mind, and I wanted a respite from the voice in my head that had run amok. I began spending an hour each day walking around a gymnasium while counting breaths, an exercise that reportedly could calm the mind. The idea was to count ten breath exhalations and then start over again at "one." Ha ha. I couldn't get to "three!" Nevertheless, I persisted, and after a few weeks, I noticed something that I had never seen even though I had driven by it every day. That surprised me, and I wondered if the breath awareness exercise was changing the way I saw and interacted with the world.
I then added a second hour of looking and listening to my daily schedule. After work, I would walk down a country road and just look and listen. Each time thoughts pulled me away from what I could see or hear I would gently return attention to what the eyes could see or the ears could hear. Again, I had some surprising experiences. For example, I saw animals and birds that I had not seen in many years, and I smelled honeysuckle and new-mown grass for the first time in over a decade. I began to realize that I had lived so totally absorbed by the thoughts in my head that I had been blind to the real world.
With this realization, I added a third hour of breath awareness exercises at night (counting breaths, following the breath, feeling the breath, being the breath, etc). After five months, I began falling into deep states of samadhi in which selfhood disappeared. Shortly thereafter I had a big woo woo experience during which seven of my main existential questions were answered. After that I became a spiritual fanatic (ha ha), and started going on weekend silent retreats.
The more silent I became the more I understood, and eventually I ceased being a spiritual fanatic (a fortunate thing for the people around me!) and became an ordinary person. Gradually I became what we might call "a person of action" rather than a "person of reflection, and life got very simple. Eventually, the mind became seen as a handy tool rather than an enemy, and it no longer mattered whether thinking occurred or didn't occur.
It's important to understand that I did not "get myself out of my head." I reached a point where I saw that the one wanting to get out of its head did not exist, and that there is only one thing here--THIS. But that's another story.
The bottom line? If you did nothing more than walk around looking at the world in silence, you would discover more about what's going on than if you read ten thousand books of philsophy and science. One year of attentive stillness is worth more than fifty years of incessant thought.
I then added a second hour of looking and listening to my daily schedule. After work, I would walk down a country road and just look and listen. Each time thoughts pulled me away from what I could see or hear I would gently return attention to what the eyes could see or the ears could hear. Again, I had some surprising experiences. For example, I saw animals and birds that I had not seen in many years, and I smelled honeysuckle and new-mown grass for the first time in over a decade. I began to realize that I had lived so totally absorbed by the thoughts in my head that I had been blind to the real world.
With this realization, I added a third hour of breath awareness exercises at night (counting breaths, following the breath, feeling the breath, being the breath, etc). After five months, I began falling into deep states of samadhi in which selfhood disappeared. Shortly thereafter I had a big woo woo experience during which seven of my main existential questions were answered. After that I became a spiritual fanatic (ha ha), and started going on weekend silent retreats.
The more silent I became the more I understood, and eventually I ceased being a spiritual fanatic (a fortunate thing for the people around me!) and became an ordinary person. Gradually I became what we might call "a person of action" rather than a "person of reflection, and life got very simple. Eventually, the mind became seen as a handy tool rather than an enemy, and it no longer mattered whether thinking occurred or didn't occur.
It's important to understand that I did not "get myself out of my head." I reached a point where I saw that the one wanting to get out of its head did not exist, and that there is only one thing here--THIS. But that's another story.
The bottom line? If you did nothing more than walk around looking at the world in silence, you would discover more about what's going on than if you read ten thousand books of philsophy and science. One year of attentive stillness is worth more than fifty years of incessant thought.
