Chapter 15: Histories of mind wandering

However, part of what these concepts imply has been expounded on in meditative traditions for hundreds or maybe thousands of years.

The idea of “effortlessness” is a good example. In most modern forms of meditation, the meditator is told to practice without effort, and this is particularly emphasized in nondirective meditation. The same notion has been part of both Asian and European meditative traditions from the beginning. Four hundred years ago, the Chinese Buddhist master Hanshan Deqing advised his fellow monks to meditate “gently,” and several hundred years earlier, the English work The Cloud of Unknowing instructed its readers to practice “with eager enjoyment rather than with brute force” and with “either little effort or none at all.” Throughout the centuries, most meditative traditions have had in common that meditation should be done in a light and effortless manner.

In contrast, the traditional attitude toward mind wandering has been much more ambivalent. While nondirective meditation and several other modern practices see spontaneous thoughts as a natural part of meditation practice, both Asian and European traditions have often tried to empty the mind of thoughts, either by active suppression or by acts believed to make the thoughts dissolve of their own accord.

The contrast is not absolute. On the one hand, quite a few modern schools of meditation continue to restrict the freedom of the wandering mind, and most of us can recognize the wish to get rid of disturbing thoughts. On the other hand, many traditional schools already contain the seeds of the idea that mind wandering needs to be accepted. This chapter will look at the attitude toward mind wandering from a historical perspective. The chapter builds on Eifring (2015b) and Eifring (2018).

Seven Deadly Sins

Let us start in the distant past, in Late Antiquity, in one of the traditions that tended to have the most negative attitude toward random thoughts: early Christianity. In this tradition, digressive thoughts were quite often seen as sinful.

One of those who contributed to this notion of sinfulness was the Desert Father Evagrios Pontikos. He lived in the fourth century in different parts of what is now Turkey, Israel, and Egypt. He had good reason to be skeptical toward spontaneous thoughts. While he was serving as a deacon in Constantinople, he fell in love with a married woman. In a vision, he saw the woman’s husband dispatching soldiers to put him in jail, and an angel came to him with warnings. He fled to Jerusalem, but even there he was pestered by sinful thoughts, and he fell seriously ill. He decided to become a monk, after which he recuperated and spent the rest of his life in 1 contemplation in the Egyptian desert.

Evagrios is particularly famous for his notion of logismoi, usually translated as “thoughts.” Most of the time, he was concerned with how thoughts are linked to demonic temptations. Such thoughts were the origin of all sinful behavior. His list of eight such temptations includes gluttony, fornication, avarice, sorrow, discouragement, anger, vainglory, and pride. A couple of hundred years later pope Gregory I merged discouragement and sorrow into sloth, made vainglory a part of pride and added envy to the newly defined “Seven Deadly Sins.” These are the origin of all sin and carry the threat of eternal damnation. Not strange, perhaps, that letting 2 thoughts come and go seemed a dangerous thing to do.

In the contemplative tradition that followed, the guarding of the heart became an important principle, as did attentiveness and watchfulness. In this worldview, thoughts are not simply a psychological reality, but can at worst represent demonic powers that seek to enter into one’s soul. As Hesychios the Priest of Sinai said some time in the eighth or ninth century:

Watchfulness is a continual fixing and halting of thought at the entrance to the heart. In this way predatory and murderous thoughts are marked down as they approach and what they say and do is noted; and we can see in what specious and delusive form the demons are trying to deceive the intellect. If we are conscientious in this, we can gain much experience and knowledge of spiritual warfare. (Palmer et al., 1979, p. 163)

From a modern standpoint this may sound alien. However, the tradition to which Evagrios and Hesychios belonged was by no means only primitive and negative. For instance, while Evagrios was most concerned with demonic thoughts, he also believed that some thoughts come from the angels, and that others are simply human in nature. And in Hesychios’s definition of watchfulness, only the first of four parts consists of “closely scrutinizing every mental image,” in order to avoid letting Satan use such images to “fabricate an evil thought” and lead our intellect astray. The second part consists of “freeing the heart from all thoughts, keeping it profoundly silent and still, and in praying,” and this seems neither warlike nor primitive, but rather sounds like a combination of modern mindfulness and Christian devotion. The third part consists of “continually and humbly calling upon the Lord Jesus Christ for help,” which is hardly surprising in a work on Christian faith, and it reminds us that the forgiveness of Christianity may express a form of basic acceptance. Finally, the fourth form of watchfulness is not restricted to Christianity, and is not particularly negative toward thoughts, but rather confronts us with realities that even modern man finds disturbing: “Always … have the thought of death in [your] mind.” However we relate to the stream of thoughts, the awareness of our own pending death may help us distinguish more clearly between what in our lives is important and what is not.

The cloud of forgetting

In Christian contemplation, thoughts and fantasies are closely linked to desire and carnal lust. The important distinction is not between body and mind, but between our phenomenal world—including both body and mind—and what lies beyond all phenomena and belongs to God. What a modern mind easily reads as a negative attitude toward thoughts could rather be seen as an effort to reach a divine dimension that transcends the whole of creation. Thoughts are worldly and need to be left behind in order to come into contact with this dimension.

In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, this contemplative impulse spread across most of Europe. In the fourteenth century, an anonymous English country parson addressed a young and equally nameless contemplative monk in what became the famous mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing (Wolters, 1978). The country parson is not ready to judge all spontaneous thoughts as expressions of personal sin or guilt:

For a spontaneous thought, springing to mind unsought and unwittingly, cannot be reckoned to be sin.

Perhaps in order to avoid provoking the Inquisition, he adds:

It may be sin, if you like, in the sense that it is the result of original sin, depriving you of power over all your thoughts— you were cleansed from the guilt of that when you were baptized.

Nevertheless, he does see thoughts as a hindrance on the way toward the contemplation of divine love:

… the bare thought of anything at all, rising unbidden in your mind, serves to remove you further from God than you would otherwise be (it gets in your way and renders you less able to experience his love) … The country parson, however, does not see the spontaneous thoughts as the biggest threat. What he fears most is that one begins to cling to these thoughts, so that a passing pleasant thought becomes lasting pride, avarice, gluttony, or lust, and a passing unpleasant thought becomes lasting wrath, envy, or sloth. At the outset, all thoughts stand between man and God. Even thoughts about saints, angels, and other spiritual beings are, according to the country parson, an obstacle rather than help, though he hastens to add that they are good, not evil, maybe again to avoid the attention of the Inquisition.

In its fight against thoughts, The Cloud of Unknowing sometimes sounds almost as combative as Evagrios and Hesychios. The young contemplative monk is urged to “suppress all thought under the cloud of forgetting,” to “trample them down under foot,” and “as often as they come up, [to] push them down,” using short words of prayer, such as “GOD” or “LOVE,” as his hammer against the thoughts. Despite the violent wording, however, it is the dart of love that is ultimately going to help the young monk break through the cloud of unknowing and come closer to God.

Many contemplative traditions have noticed that attempts to dispel thoughts do not always succeed, but rather create new layers of inner tension. The Cloud of Unknowing suggests two alternatives for those who are unable to rid the mind of thoughts. They can “do everything [they] can to act as if [they] did not know that the thoughts are so strongly pushing in between [them] and God,” in a sense pretend that the thoughts do not exist. Or they can give up, “cower down before [the thoughts] like some cringing captive overcome in battle, and reckon that it is ridiculous to fight against them any longer,” and “surrender [themselves] to God while [they] are in the hands of [their] enemies,” i.e., their thoughts! Both methods indicate a certain reluctant acceptance of the presence of thoughts, thus admitting that though the goal of one’s practice lies beyond creation, we ourselves are part of this creation, and the thoughts are part of us.

Beyond phenomena

As we have seen, European contemplative traditions place the stream of thoughts in the same category as the body, in contrast to Descartes’s distinction between body and mind, matter and spirit. According to the contemplative traditions, thoughts belong to the phenomenal world, while meditation and contemplation seek a dimension beyond all phenomena. That is one of the reasons that thoughts are so often seen as a hindrance for meditative and contemplative practice. On this point, Western tradition is far closer to the traditions of India and China than we usually believe. In all these traditions, thoughts belong to the world of phenomena and need to be surpassed in order to reach the non-phenomenal dimension typically sought in contemplative and meditative traditions.

Table 15.1. The phenomenal and non-phenomenal realms in various contemplative traditions

The important distinction in Christianity is between the Creator and His creation, between God and the world, and mind wandering belongs to the world God created, not to God himself. In order to get closer to God, we need to transcend the world of all the phenomena He created, including all the thoughts that pass through the mind. In Yoga and related Indian traditions the corresponding distinction is between the Self (purusha or atman), which is more or less the same as God (Ishvara or Brahman), and matter in a wide sense (prakriti), the stray thoughts of mind wandering belonging to the latter. Buddhism rejects the existence of an eternal self or, for that matter, an eternal god, but also seeks a standpoint beyond the world as we know it, transcending the wheel of life and death (samsara). Again, mind wandering is part of the world that must be overcome. In Daoism a similar distinction exists between the all-encompassing Way (Dao) and all things belonging to our narrow worldly existence, and the wandering mind keeps us in the world instead of bringing us closer to the Way.

There are many subtle differences between these ways of thinking, such as the strict dualism and belief in a supreme god in Christianity and Yoga, in contrast to the non-dualism of Buddhism and the monism of Daoism, none of which attaches importance to God or gods. Despite these differences, however, the basic features are surprisingly similar.

Thoughtless thought

The most important scripture of the Yoga tradition, Yoga Sutra, defines Yoga as “the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind” (Bryant, 2009). Only when the fluctuations have been brought to a halt is it possible to reach full realization, and the self may “abide in its own true nature.” On the way toward that goal, one passes through various stages of “one-pointedness” (ekagrata, ekagrya), concentration (dharana), and absorption (dhyana, samadhi). This has often been understood as a recommendation of concentrative meditation, in which the thoughts are actively stopped, and digressions are avoided. Under another interpretation, however, the definition describes a result, not an active endeavor. If this is correct, the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind is no longer about active concentration and suppression, but rather a form of mental absorption that comes as a spontaneous effect of long-term meditative practice. The first interpretation implies the use of willpower to drive away the thoughts, while the second interpretation implies the creation of inner conditions that eventually discharge all the tensions and energies inherent in the thoughts.

Another Indian classic, the Bhagavad Gita, tells us that Yoga helps us discipline the mind, so that the thoughts do not begin to wander. Those who lack such discipline will be “confused by many thoughts, caught in the net of deception, obsessed with the satisfaction of their desires,” and they will eventually “fall into a hell of depravation.” Again, however, it is not clear that the method to attain the goal implies active exclusion of the thoughts, though that is the way the scripture has often been understood, and throughout the centuries, many people have been busy trying to keep their thoughts at a distance. However, it may be that the desired freedom from thoughts is a spontaneous result rather than a conscious act. Perhaps this freedom does not even imply the absence of thoughts, only the absence of attachment to the thoughts, in the same way as “action” and “non-action” are seen as two aspects of the same thing: “The one who depends on nothing, and who is no longer bound to the effect of his actions, is forever satisfied, and even when he acts, he does nothing” (Johnson, 1994).

We also see this ambiguity in Buddhism. The Chinese Zen master Hanshan Deqing (1546–1623) describes in his autobiography how he repeatedly seeks to find someone who can teach him methods to control his tendency to mind wandering (see Eifring, 2015a). Both he and other Buddhist masters urge their disciples to “eradicate,” “dispel,” “extinguish,” “dissolve,” “stop,” “interrupt,” and “expel” their thoughts from the mind. Buddhism regularly calls spontaneous thoughts “deluded thoughts.” “If the thoughts melt away, your deeper nature will emerge,” says Hanshan. After some time, however, he displays a more complex understanding. “Thoughts are like wild cats, and we would never use one wild cat to tame another.” The important thing is not to drive the thoughts away, but to realize that both “the one who is thinking and the thoughts he is thinking are without substance.” Then we can be “liberated from that which binds us to the thought about not having thoughts,” and we can “hear the soundless sound, see the invisible 3 sight and think the thoughtless thought.”

The Daoist work Inward Training from a few hundred years before the Common Era urges us to “get rid of” the thoughts and “stop” them, and to “clean out their lodge,” i.e., the mind (Roth, 1999). However, it is even more concerned with “harmonizing” and “regulating” the thoughts, without trying to get rid of them, and tells us in no uncertain terms that we should avoid “pulling and pushing” them.

Let the elephant out

Both in India and China there also exist more explicitly positive evaluations of thoughts. Meditative development does not happen by stopping or suppressing thoughts, but by allowing them to come and go.

The Indian Jain philosopher Hemachandra (1088–1172) is known as one of the few thinkers in Indian meditative tradition who does not only mechanically reproduce the same instructions that have figured in writings throughout the centuries, but who experiments on his own and shares his experiences with the reader. Hemachandra compares our spontaneous thoughts and impulses with a sexually aroused elephant. The more you try to stop it, the wilder and more dangerous it becomes. If instead you let it satisfy its desires, it becomes soft and supple. That is how we need to treat our thoughts. On this point Hemachandra differs from the tradition he comes from. Even in Jain meditation scriptures most descriptions of thoughts are negative. Hemachandra’s experience, however, was different, and he took it seriously. Undoubtedly, many others have had the same experience, even if they have not left behind written testimonies thereof (Bronkhorst, 2016; Qvarnström, 2002). Note, however, that even Hemachandra did not mean to promote uninhibited sexual behavior, only a freedom of the mind for which he used the elephant as a metaphor.

In Buddhism, the traditions of mindfulness and insight meditation often accept the coming and going of thoughts. The Chinese meditation teacher Wukai (died 1830) puts it this way:

You believe thoughts are a hindrance for Buddha recitation? But who is the one seeing the emergence of the thought? If you see the thought, you have a distance to it, and if you have a distance to it, you are a buddha. Just let the thought 4 emerge, while you continue reciting the Buddha’s name.

This is similar to Hanshan Deqing’s realization more than two hundred years earlier that when both the one who is thinking and the thoughts he is thinking are without substance, we are liberated from that which binds us to the thoughts. Some of Hanshan’s meditation instructions take the thoughts themselves as a focus of attention:

Observe the thought where it emerges, to see from where it emerges, and who lets it emerge and disappear. And when the thought disappears, make sure to observe to where it disappears. This way you will discover that it emerges from nothing and disappears into nothing … The mind’s ground will be peaceful and completely free.

Hanshan says explicitly that one should not suppress thoughts. It suffices to realize that there is no place they come from or go to, and that they are thus without real substance. Then you may transcend the thoughts and find an anchoring point beyond the world that we usually relate to.

Hanshan’s instruction builds on long traditions within Buddhism. In addition to methods for meditative concentration and absorption, Buddhism has long contained techniques where one pays attention to the constant changes taking place in all aspects of reality, typically exemplified by breath, body movements, and thoughts that come and go. In this tradition, therefore, thoughts may act as a meditation object. The goal is to reach “insight” (vipassana) about the fact that nothing in reality is fixed, and that all things at all times are subject to change.

Break on through to the other side

Both in Europe and Asia, the traditional skepticism toward mind wandering in meditation derives from an attempt at reaching a dimension beyond everyday worldly reality. As we have seen, these traditions do not follow Descartes’s dichotomy between mind and body, but view both, including the wandering mind, as parts of the worldly reality that they are trying to reach beyond. It seems logical, therefore, to seek to calm or even stop such spontaneous thought activity. However, things are a little more complex. The fact is that nothing in this world belongs to the dimension that the traditional meditator is reaching for. So why is mind wandering singled out as particularly problematic? The most plausible answer is that the mind is seen as a gateway to the dimension beyond our worldly reality, in some sense closer to it than other parts of our mundane existence. However, for this gateway to function, it must be built of subtle material. The continuous stream of spontaneous thoughts is far from subtle in this sense. It is coarse and therefore threatens to block or clog the gateway.

On the other hand, many of the traditions also see the intense attempts at ridding the mind of thoughts as counterproductive. By striving and struggling to drive thoughts away, the meditator introduces another coarse element, in conflict with the principle of effortlessness, and blocks and clogs the mind in ways that are even more problematic than the mind wandering he or she is seeking to halt.

In many cases, meditative practice may bring about a peace of mind that comes spontaneously, not as the result of effort. Most often, however, spontaneous thoughts will continue to come and go. The traditions we have looked at in this chapter mostly realize that the best approach in such cases is to let this happen without attempts at interference. Simply “cower down” before the thoughts. Do not bind yourself to “the thought about not having thoughts.” Avoid “pulling and pushing” the mind. And, most expressively though perhaps also more crudely, let the sexually aroused elephant satisfy its desires and become soft and supple.

Notes

1 On Evagrios Pontikos and his life, see Casiday (2006). 2 On logismoi in Evagrios Pontikos, see Brakke (2009). 3 Hanshan Deqing, Hanshan laoren mengyouji (Old Hanshan’s Dreamwalker Collection), http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/X73n1456), quotations translated by the author. See alternative translations in Lu (1971). 4 Wukai, Jingye zhijin, (Well of Knowledge for the Purification of Karma, http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/X62n1183_001), quotations translated by the author.

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