Setting Down Thinking

Setting Down Thinking

In the video above, our mentor Ilarion Merculieff teaches us how he learned to drop out of thinking.

Many of us who have grown up in the modern world have been trained to relate to our own experience through cognition. We experience ourselves as thinkers, like Descartes. Our archetypal image is that of Rodin’s Thinker (pictured at left), a person leaning forward, fist to chin, lost in thought. This sculpture of Rodin’s, a copy of which resides at Stanford University, has a surprising mass to it, a surprising heaviness. Thought, we can observe, is heavy. It is a thing of mass. A thing working to know itself. There was a certain sadness that gripped me, at Stanford, when I passed this sculpture. The man is lost, inward, in contemplation, but elsewhere. There is an inwardness in his contemplation, but it is not an inwardness anchored in the now, and it frightened me a little bit, because I found myself wondering Where is he? And the 'he' that I wondered about, what I would call the witness to thinking, where is that part of his consciousness?

We, in the modern world, have been taught to identify with our thought stream. We seek to know ourselves, as selves, through the continuous burble and hum of thoughts moving through the mind. Gentle reader, there is no self here. The Self we are looking for–the core neurobiological self– it does not reside in cognition. I realize that some of you reading this are not going to know what I’m talking about, and others of you, perhaps of a more analytical bent, are going to find yourself understanding what I’m saying in a way that seems threatening, or makes you deeply uncomfortable. The website you’ve come to, we say, we are here to change your mind. And in this statement we mean, at the same time, at least two things. Can your mind hold the simultaneous duality inherent in that statement, which is actually a unity, at a higher level of comprehension? We mean, of course, that we are going to change your mind, your opinions, how and what you think. And we mean, of course, that we are going to change the biological structure of your brain, of all your brains, which also include the brain in your heart, and the brain in your gut, and the brain in your neuro-fascia, which, as it turns out, is shorthand for saying the brain in your body, which, as it turns out, is shorthand for saying your body, which as it turns out, is because you’ve been lied to. Your brain is not your mind. Your brain is in fact only a tiny part of your mind, which is, in fact, localized in your entire body, which is, in fact, not even then your mind, but merely the machinery running it. We’re here to teach you that what you’ve been running identity through, the thought box on top of your shoulders, is only a tiny part of your real intelligence, not the best part even, not the part most capable of being in contact with reality anyway. Can your mind, your thinking mind, hold onto the reality that when we say we are here to change your mind we mean two things simultaneously? Not, like the wave/ particle duality, that it means one thing or the other, depending on how you are looking at it, but that it always means both things. That it always means we are here to change your thoughts AND the biological structure of your mind, which you have been taught is localized in your thinking, but is not. If you are still with me, you are beginning to feel what I mean, because you can’t process what I’m saying only mentally. If you are getting nervous, you are beginning to feel it, and now you are beginning to understand viscerally what I’m saying, and here is the doorway. Here is the doorway because the moment you begin to have a visceral feeling, the moment you begin to feel it in your body, your experience itself belies the lie you have been told, because the moment you feel it in your body, you come into the present moment.

Thinking makes its living by not being in the here and now. And it is not a living. It is a movement away from living. To identify with thinking, to localize in the thought, is to not really be here. The movement we are inviting is a movement down out of thinking, down out of the brain box, into the body. It is a re-associative movement, a weaving, a dropping down into the felt sense of the body, the visceral, sensing, feeling, emoting realness of a felt embodied experience. We come weaving the body back to the mind. The inner to the outer. The High to the Low, which have been inverted in modernity.

What I’d like you to do, should you be brave enough to do so, is to see if you can place your attention, the spotlight of your attention, into the body. I’d like to invite you to bring your attention to your chest, to your heart, this may be to the anxiety in your heart, the feeling of worry, of concern, or wherever you can feel vibration in your body. Whether you identify that vibration with fear, or simply with sensation, I’d like you to see if, for the next minute or so, you can attend to that vibration itself. Not to think about it, but just to feel it. Not to interpret it, try to make sense of it, understand it. Just to feel it. The living breathing hum of a sensation in a body. I’d like to invite you to allow your attention to rest into it, and to observe it as though it were an animal (it is), a living, feeling, breathing animal. I’d like you to notice it changing. I’d like you to notice that it moves, and shifts, that its texture changes. That it intensifies, and then grows more diffuse. That it expands and contracts. That it migrates through the body, sometimes gradually, sometimes rushing. The work of mindful awareness is this simple. To bring attention out of the thought stream, out of cognition, into the felt present moment experience of the body. I want to invite you to begin to get to know yourself from here. Through the lens, through the vehicle of this felt experience. This, gentle reader, is a way of knowing. It is what our dear friend and mentor Ilarion Merculieff calls ‘indigenous intelligence.’ It is what buddhist meditators have been training themselves to do for millienia. It is what trackers the world over have done since the dawn of time. It is locating our awareness, our attention, in and through the body. Let the stream of thought dry up, like a stream bed in a drought. Thinking, that thing you’ve been running attention through, is no more and no less than water moving through a creekbed. You are not the stream. You are not even the streambed. You, the core neurobiological self, you are the capacity to localize attention. You are the awareness. And if you engage deeply with this work, what you will discover is that you can train that attention to operate through your body, and that if you do this, it will change your entire experience of being alive.

Take it slowly. If you really begin to understand what I am saying here, it will completely change your life. Ilarion says that we, in the west, understand intelligence as something that arises from thinking, but that indigenous people know that intelligence begins the moment thinking stops. You can organize your entire intelligence to arise not from thinking at all, but the illumination of awareness running through your mind body system. You can organize your entire intelligence into the present moment, into the felt, into the now, so that it moves through you and inhabits every cell in your body, becomes a vibrating living fabric of awareness that extends not only through your body, but reaches out into the world around you through a felt sense of connection, of union, with all that is. This is connection phenomenology. This is the oldest deepest school of humanity. You have come back to the Source.

The source isn’t me, the writer, but it moves through me, because it is a Force, a Superior Force of awareness, that is latent in and pervades everything. This force is known by various names. It has been called the Tao. Yoda calls it, simply, the Force. Some people call it God. The Lakota name for the force, Wakan Thanka, is so beautiful, because it acknowledges that God is a verb. The Holy Mysteriousing. In Aramaic, it is called Alaha. The Sacred Unity. The One with no opposite. It is unity consciousness. And when we learn to drop into the body, into feeling, we open the doorway into cultivation of this present moment awareness, this relationship with everything. It is important, in so doing, to find our center. It is important to become centered in ourselves so that we don’t go crazy, in contact with all of this information, manifest, revealed. The center, gentle reader, is in your heart. It is the true center of intelligence. The word for heart, in Aramaic, is leba. It means the center, the pith, the best part of anything. Center yourself in the heart.

And yet, even the heart, of which we speak, is not merely or purely anatomical, though it is also that. Neurocardiology shows us plainly that the biological heart is comprised of more neural cells than muscle cells. It isn’t a pump, or a pump only. What happens when you enclose an electrical system (the nervous system) with a closed system of liquid pressure (the vascular system) tied to a rhythmic oscillator? Answer: you create an electromagnetic field. The heart creates this field, which is detectable with a magnetometer up to twenty feet away from your body. Your heart is the center of this awareness. And what your heart really means is to feel. There is a moment, in Star Wars, where Obi Wan Kanobi is training Luke, and he says to him, “Reach out with your feelings.” Consider where the perimeter of the body lies. If your heart is broadcasting a spherical field twenty feet in all directions, why do you think that the edge of your perception is the edge of your body? Have you not noticed, in a COVID world where people give you six feet of space, that you can feel them if they are closer than that? If your body is the edge of your sensing awareness, how can you feel them six feet away? You aren’t who you think you are.

Don’t think. You know it to be true viscerally. You can feel it already. And as you begin to attend to feeling, you will begin to realize why most of us don’t feel more, don’t have stable moment-to-moment contact with feeling. It is too painful. If you really feel, if you really begin to feel, you will start to notice the headache. You will start to notice the pain in your brain that comes from its over-use. You will start to notice the discomfort. And here is where the practice begins. Because that pain is also a doorway. That headache is the evidence of you running awareness through the wrong circuitry. What I want to invite you to do, if you are still with me, is to begin to engage in several related practices. I want to invite you to begin, each day, to spend a bit of time sitting still. I want you to do this wherever you are in this moment, and I also want you to do it outdoors. See the practice called Sit Spot. It is only when you are sitting still that the motion of the mind is magnified, and you begin to really feel its chaos. As soon as you get still, in a chair, on a cushion, in the forest, I want you to bring your attention to sensation in the body. I don’t care where. Bring it to the first part of your visceral felt experience that you notice. What it is doesn’t matter. That’s only the doorway in. As soon as you can feel any tiny part of your interior (if you can’t feel any part of your interior, go now to COMING OUT OF FREEZE), rest your attention there and begin to allow your attention to engage it as sensation. Allow yourself to surf the sensation. To ride it, maintaining contact with it. Let sensation itself be the wave that your ride, sensitively, curiously, leaning into it and noticing. Then find your feet on the floor from inside, through sensation. Localize your connection with the ground. Allow that felt sense of the ground beneath you to merge with your sensing of the body from inside. Breathe. Allow sensations to arise, and let them fall away. Allow yourself to become enchanted by the fluxus. Find your seat, find your balance. If there is pain (there will be) see if you can relax into it. Breathe with the pain. Breathe into it, breathe around it. You enter the domain there, through felt visceral experience, of what is known as implicit memory. Memory in the body. Memory of sensation, emotion, the felt texture of sensory memory enveloping the body. The memory held, generally beneath the threshold of conscious awareness, that is the operating system of your bodily reactions to the layers of the world: your family, your tribe, your society… As you deepen into this visceral, embodied awareness, you come into contact with yoru own operating system, invisibilized by your mind, to guard against knowing itself, yet present, mechanical, a structuring of your deeper felt awareness. Here is the pain you’ve organized your life around not knowing. Here is the doorway to unwinding what we call trauma, to unwinding your own socialization, to unwinding the dissociation at the heart of the modern world. It lives here, in your body, a private and a collective enterprise required to dismantle the dissociation that took you out of it, out of your body, sometime in childhood, your individual childhood, and the collective childhood of humanity, when something happened that exiled you from your heart, and you found yourself locked out, unable to get back home.