Challenging Your Thoughts

One way to deal with the habit of being sucked into thoughts is to use thoughts to challenge thoughts. Thoughts that are especially convincing usually have some element of truth to them, but are they—as the legal phrase goes—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? When you challenge your thoughts by asking this, you find their limitations. This is like using a stick to rub against another stick and bring fire; then once you have a good fire going you can throw both sticks into it!

Take even a trivial thought, such as “the sky is blue.” Is that the whole truth? Isn’t there some grey, white, or purple there, or maybe even orange, brown, or red, depending on the time of day? Even on the occasion when the sky appears to be only blue, is it azure, baby blue, Columbia blue, powder blue or what? Isn’t “blue” too simple a concept to capture the whole truth of the color of the sky?

And this does not even address the problem of whether the sky actually is blue when it looks blue, or only appears blue due to our particular vantage point. If you called up someone ten miles away and asked them to confirm your observation that the sky is blue, they might very well respond that “it is grey and rainy here!” So which is it really—blue or grey?

Although they can be useful, thoughts seduce us into regarding the world of thought is the actual world, and the distortions this creates leads to all kinds of mistakes and suffering in our lives. Of course not all thoughts are equally problematic. Thoughts about the color of the sky are not as likely to cause problems as are thoughts about ourselves, other people, the nature of life, and similar thoughts.

Particularly problematic are thoughts associated with a feeling. A feeling attracts a thought which leads to a chain of associations: “I feel sad, I am sad because my life has not been going well, my life has not been going well because the world is uncaring.” Or, “I feel angry, I am angry because of what you did, you are the source of my dissatisfaction with my life, you need to change how you act.” The feeling acts as a magnet for certain kinds of thoughts, and then an echo chamber ensues in which the thoughts amplify the feeling and the feeling attracts more of those thoughts.

In addition to the amplification effect, the feeling will insist on the truth of the thoughts associated with it. This is because feelings want to be acknowledged. So if you have a thought accompanied by a feeling, you must acknowledge the feeling in order to challenge the thought. For example, simply acknowledging “I am feeling angry,” will make it easier to follow up with “maybe I misunderstood what he said.” My formula here is: challenge the thought but acknowledge the feeling.

The best way to acknowledge a feeling is simply by paying attention to it. Avoid labeling the feeling too quickly; first just pay attention to feeling whatever it is you are feeling. Often the first thought about a feeling is not even close to the truth; sometimes “I am feeling hungry and tired” is more accurate than “I am feeling sad,” or “I feel afraid of losing you” is more accurate than “I am angry at you.” Also, notice I am using the verb “feel” to avoid identifying with the feeling: “I feel angry, I feel sad,” rather than “I am angry, I am sad.” This is a way of dis-identifying from the feeling even as you acknowledge it.

People who are more educated or intellectually inclined will have both an advantage and a disadvantage in challenging their thoughts. The advantage is that, due to exposure to a variety of different thoughts and having practiced logical analysis of thoughts, they are more skilled at challenging particular thoughts. The disadvantage is that these same people become skilled at constructing ever more elaborate thoughts; they challenge their thoughts and then go on to create more sophisticated thoughts to replace them. More complex thought-systems can be more seductive for their intricacy!

Whatever their intellectual or educational level, people are inclined to seek security in their thoughts; the sense of “knowing” something via thought gives a false sense of grounding in what is otherwise a mysterious and constantly changing world.

The aim of all this is not to do away with thoughts and create a state of mind without thought. The aim is to learn to hold thoughts lightly, so they can be used for what they are good at without fooling you into believing they are “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The first step in awakening is awakening to the nature of thought, which is that thought is a limited method of representing reality and not reality itself.

In awakening you come home to reality, and no longer look to thoughts for security.

© 2012 Alan F. Zundel

Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at www.heartawake.org.