What Are Thoughts & Thinking Really?
Part 3 of 6 on What is Real?
If you haven’t already, before reading this article, read Part 1 and Part 2 of the What is Real series.
Also, for helpful context, watch: Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk called My Stroke of Insight (18 min).
“Perception, imagination, expectation, anticipation, illusion - all are based on memory. There are hardly any border lines between them. They just merge into each other. All are responses of memory.”
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj, East Indian Non-Dualist Teacher
“You exist as an idea in your mind.”
~ Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Master of the 20th Century
"The ego [or personhood or our identity] is a fictitious character that the mind believes itself to be and only exists in the mind but not in reality. This is where consciousness has mistakenly believed itself (identified) to be the body/mind. This is where all the problems arise, this is where we find all human mental suffering.”
~ Soham
“Ego is the movement of the mind toward objects of perception in the form of grasping, and away from objects in the form of aversion. This fundamentally is all the ego is.”
~ Adyashanti, American Non-Dualist Teacher
“Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind."
~ Eckhart Tolle
“In My Stroke of Insight, the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that’s an automatic response lasts just 90 seconds from the moment it’s triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that’s all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it’s because we’ve chosen to rekindle it.
The fact of the shifting, changing nature of our emotions is something we could take advantage of. But do we? No. Instead, when an emotion comes up, we fuel it with our thoughts, and what should last one and a half minutes may be drawn out for 10 or 20 years.
We just keep recycling the story line. We keep strengthening our old habits.”
~ Pema Chödrön, Buddhist Nun, Teacher, and Author
“All of the teachings of the Buddha have one clear message, which is that there is nothing more important than getting to know your own mind. The reason is simple: the source of our every suffering is discovered within this mind. If we're feeling anxious, that stress and worry are produced by this mind. If we're overwrought by despair, that misery originates within our mind. On the other hand, if we're madly in love and walking on air, that joy also arises from our mind. Pleasure and pain, simple and extreme, are experiences of mind.
Mind is the experiencer of each moment of our life and all that we perceive, think, and feel. Therefore, the better we know our mind and how it works, the greater the possibility that we can free ourselves from the mental states that weigh us down, invisibly wound us, and destroy our ability to be happy. Knowing our mind not only leads to a happy life, it transforms every trace of confusion and wakes us up completely.
To experience that awakened state is to know freedom in its purest sense. This state of freedom is not dependent on external circumstances. It does not change with the ups and downs of life. It's the same whether we experience gain or loss, praise or blame, pleasant or unpleasant conditions. In the beginning, we only glimpse this state, but those glimpses become increasingly more familiar and stable. In the end, the state of freedom becomes our home ground.”
~ Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhist Master
First
From a Buddhist point of view, to answer the question, “What are thoughts & thinking really?” one must first learn about the five skandhas - the foundation of Buddhist psychology.
Buddhist psychology isn’t anything like Western psychology so I invite you, for the duration of this read, to drop any oft-called-on notion you may have of Western psychology so you can form your own understanding of what I’m about to share.
“As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it’s no longer what you saw.”
~ Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Master
To one degree or another, this article may bring some understanding of the madness of the world as well as the madness of our own minds.
From our own innate tendencies and the repeated use of language, we have each adopted - without reservation - the belief that the body, mind, thoughts, and emotions are what we are - that they’re “me” - and that everything outside the body, mind, thoughts, and emotions is “not me.” AND that the things that we can perceive through our five senses are real and anything we can’t perceive through the five senses is not real (though we make concessions for radio waves, wifi, bluetooth, God, and the like).
These fundamental dualities create a split in our experience that leads us to feel disconnected from our True Nature (ALOHA). And along with that come all the feelings of fear: hatred, loneliness, isolation, anxiety, anger, longing, retaliation, etc.
Perhaps from the information in this article, you will begin to see how it is that your life has gotten to the place where it is. Why there is struggle, anxiety, depression, disturbing emotions, and suffering in your life and the lives of others around the world.
Please keep in mind the TED Talk by Jill Bolte Taylor above and articles #1 and #2 of this series. At the same time, I’m inviting you to do two more things: 1) notice how your mind reacts to what you’re reading, and 2) maintain your critical intelligence.
At the same time, there is NO expectation to believe anything you read until you have proven it to be true in your own experience.
Introduction
Skandha is a Sanskrit word that’s typically defined as “aggregate.” In daily conversation, skandha could mean “heap” or “bundle” or “pile.”
You could think of the five skandhas as the five “tendencies” that develop your conceptual mind: your “logical” mind, your “thinking” mind, your “rational” mind. And from those tendencies, the cocoon is created - your ego – the personality that you identify as and everything that goes with it; including your self-important thinking, intellectualizing, feeling, speaking, and acting.
In addition, the story is about how the ego judges, influences, and interprets everything you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch according to all of the data (in the form of memories) collected through your five sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, & body) over the course of your entire life. This “data” includes the conditioning and formal education you absorb from family, friends, religion, society, authority figures, TV, movies, radio, commercials, advertisements, rhetoric, gossip, and so on.
The development of the five skandhas is quite natural, and at times handy, but since they’ve fully come online, your life has not been fully yours per se – not authentically yours, anyway.
Before The Skandhas Arise
At birth, our experience is pure open space. We have no concepts and no understanding of anything. We have no spoken language to describe anything or communicate. We have no sense of identity.
Baby is pure Being. Baby is Being without knowledge or self-consciousness. At this stage, we feel one with all that is - there is no experience of separation.
Our most fundamental state of mind, at this stage, is basic ground, basic consciousness, basic freedom, basic safety, basic trust, basic goodness, and wide open space. And we dance in this open space. We are curious in this open space.
We interact through our innate qualities: awareness, love, curiosity, humor, feeling (as an action verb), primordial confidence (confidence before there was ever doubt), kindness, wonder, and compassion to name a few.
This was our original experience or, you could say, the natural state of our mind or our “original” mind: our heart-mind (hara, dantian, kath, naʻau, etc.).
This experience is also the natural resting state of the mind that adults reach through true meditation: Open, fresh, alert, aware, and pure (unadulterated by conditioning).
So our original state - our natural state as humans - is relaxed, open, and spacious. We feel safe, free, and at one with everything; we have no sense of being separate from anything else. We experience pure wonderment, curiosity, and peaceful lovingness. And we dance freely in the openness of this vast open space. Life is good.
“Fundamentally, there is just open space, the basic ground, what we really are.
Our most fundamental state of mind, before the creation of ego, is such that there is basic openness, basic freedom, a spacious quality; and we have now and have always had this openness.”
~ Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
1. FORM
But then there’s a moment when we realize “I” exist (exist: from Latin ex(s)istere “to appear, emerge”). We feel separate from the unity of vast open space.
Memories of pain and pleasure begin to coalesce beginning with the experience of hunger. A separate sense of self arises - the ego - because we identify with our memories of pain and pleasure. “I’m hungry. I’m here. Mom is over there.”
As this continues, we forget we’re a part of everything else. Now, we are separate. And everything else is separate from us and separate from each other.
This is the first skandha: “Form” (rupa in Sanskrit, also referred to as “material form”).
Form refers to all matter, both internal and external. It refers to our body as well as the five physical sense organs. Form includes the entire universe of matter beyond the body as well as what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.
“Form is any disturbance in the field of awareness.”
~ Rupert Spira, British Non-Dualist Teacher
“In the beginning, there is open space belonging to no one, and within that space is primeval intelligence, or vidya, so there is both intelligence and space. It is like a completely open and spacious room in which you can dance about and not be afraid of knocking anything over. You are this space; you are one with it.
But you become confused. Because it is so spacious, you begin to whirl and dance about. You become too active in the space.
As you dance, you want to experience the space more and more, to enjoy the dance and the openness. But at that point, space is no longer space, as such. It has become solid space because of your unnecessary urge to contact it.
When you try to cling to space, to grasp it, the whole perspective is completely changed. You have solidified space and made it tangible. That sense of self-consciousness is the birth of duality.
Spaciousness has become solid space, and you have begun to identify yourself with the “I.” You are identified with the duality of “I” and space, rather than being completely one with space. You have become self-conscious, conscious that “you” are dancing in space. This is the birth of the first skandha, the skandha of form.
Having solidified space, you forget what you have done. Suddenly there is a blackout, a gap. Your intelligence suddenly collapses, and you are completely overwhelmed by ignorance in a kind of reverse enlightenment experience.
When you wake up, you become fascinated with your own creation, acting as if you had nothing to do with it, as though you yourself were not the creator of all this solidity. You deliberately ignore the openness and intelligence, so the intelligent, sharp, precise, flowing, and luminous quality of space becomes static.
There is still primeval intelligence, or vidya, but it has been captured and solidified. Therefore, it has become avidya, or ignorance. That blackout of intelligence is the source of the ego. From that sudden blackout, as you continue to explore, gradually things become more and more solid.
The skandha of form has three stages. The first stage, the birth of ignorance, is a kind of chemical reaction in which you come to the conclusion of your own separateness. It is as if there were a desert, simple and basic, but strangely and suddenly one of the grains of sand popped up and began to look around.
The second stage is called the ignorance born within. Having noticed that you are separate, you feel that you have always been so. However, that instinct toward self-consciousness is awkward. You feel unbalanced, so you try to secure your ground and create a shelter for yourself. You take the attitude that you are a confused and separate individual, and that is all there is to it.
The third type of ignorance is self-observing ignorance. As you are watching yourself, you see yourself as an external object, which leads to the notion of “other.” You are beginning to have a relationship with the so-called “external world.” You are beginning to create the world of forms.”
~ Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Path of Individual Liberation
2. FEELING
The next or 2nd skandha to arise is “Feeling” (vedanā in Sanskrit, also referred to as “Feeling Tone”).
This skandha is the quality in each moment of sense contact - whenever we see something, hear something, smell something, taste something, and touch something - as it is experienced by the individual in one of three ways: as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant (also called neutral).
From these qualities of experience, we form likes & dislikes.
When we react to the world, we have an experience of what we like and what we don’t like. We are constantly deciding if things in the world (or in our mind) are: 1) pleasant and for us - something we want; 2) unpleasant and are against us - something we don’t want; or 3) neither pleasant nor unpleasant - they are neutral - things that don’t affect us so we feel we can ignore them or overlook them.
In the 1st skandha, there is a sense of separation: me, separate from the world. Now, with the 2nd skandha, we are wondering if that world is going to hurt us, or if it is something we want to seduce and hold onto, or if it is something irrelevant so we can ignore it.
Touch into this 2nd skandha for moment: constantly picking and choosing. Is that someone I want to know or someone I want to push away? Is this situation not something I want to be involved in or is it something good for me? Is that sound something I should investigate or something I can ignore?
We spend a lot of time ignoring the world around us. We spend a lot of time attaching, clinging, and grasping onto parts of the world we want - often referred to as “passion.” And we spend a lot of time trying to fight away or push off experiences, feelings, and people around us - often referred to as “aggression.”
Along with passion, aggression, and ignoring, come confusion, frustration, & intensity. According to Siddhartha Gautama, the historic Buddha, this is the formula at the foundation of all suffering and struggle in the world.
As we look at each skandha, keep your eye out for a layering of defense mechanisms against the feeling of vast open space. First, there was, “Oh! I’m here, I’m separate.” Now, we’re reacting to the world around us: Is it for me, against me, or something I can ignore?
3. PERCEPTION
The 3rd skandha is called “Perception” (samjña in Sanskrit).
Perception refers to the activity of the mind that recognizes an object whether it’s seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched.
It’s not enough to decide if things are good, bad, or neutral. The 3rd skandha brings in intellect to recognize, label, categorize, organize, and conceptualize each and every thing in the world around us and at the moment we perceive them - constantly! - all based on our conditioning and memories.
We’re conceiving and labeling everything around us to get a better fix on our place, or where we fit, in the midst of the phenomenal universe, the vast open space - and to determine a sense of safety.
Like a submarine pinging device, we are constantly sizing up other things, people, and situations to confirm our existence and our place in the hierarchy of the world. As a result, we’re adding more and more concepts to our idea of the world.
In the beginning, in pure spaciousness, there was very little if any concept of anything. Then when the 1st skandha arose, a huge concept appeared called “me.” “I” appeared: there is me, and there is world – that’s it. With the 2nd skandha, there’s another layer of complexity: it’s not just me and world; it’s me, world, like, dislike, & neutral. With the 3rd skandha, we have an added layer of conceptualization. Now, we have concepts, labels, categories, & organization.
We are losing our sense of unity with ALOHA, our True Nature. The world is crystalizing: more shape, more form, more specificity, more boundaries. The world is solidifying; and as a result, sense of self is responding by becoming even more solid.
4. MENTAL FORMATIONS
The 4th skandha is called “Mental Formations” (samskāra in Sanskrit, also referred to as Volitional Formations).
There are three categories of volitional formations: mental (mental activity), verbal (actions of speech), and bodily (physical actions).
Volitional formations refer to yet another layer of complexity and concept of defense mechanism. Here, we add an entangled flood of notions that are rich and charged with heightened energy: We have emotional experiences - happiness, fear, joy, anger, jealousy, surprise, and so on.
These mental formations are called “volitional” because they express our will or motivation based on the 2nd skandha experience of self-concerned wanting, not-wanting, and ignoring.
"According to the Buddha’s teachings, the most basic condition for happiness is freedom. Here we do not mean political freedom, but freedom from the mental formations of anger, despair, jealousy, and delusion. These mental formations are described by the Buddha as poisons. As long as these poisons are still in our heart, [consistent] happiness cannot be possible.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Once activated, these volitions are more likely to arise again in the future as habits.
In the mental realm, volitional formations include all of our thoughts and the “thinking” process. The “thinking” process is the act of memory-retrieval by the conceptual mind (memories of everything we’ve ever seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched) accessing what is already stored in the body’s memory databank. Mental volitional formations also include our moods and emotions: happiness, fear, joy, hatred, desire, resentment, love, cruelty, confusion, tranquility, etc.
All the kinds of happiness that can be imagined for the term “heavenly” are included in volitional formations, as are all the intense miseries we ascribe to “hellish.” The creative thoughts of Einstein and the murderous thoughts of Hitler are here. So are Jesus’ love and the wisdom of the Buddha.
With volitional formations, we’re not satisfied with just categorizing and judging things, we now need to have the charge of positive and negative emotional experiences (mental, verbal, and bodily) in order to have a full-blown ego experience.
You know what I’m talking about.
Our emotional experience with the world infuses our conceptual experience with heightened energy and leads to a very strong sense of: I am HERE, the world is THERE!
“Ramana Maharshi [once] said to me, ‘The only spiritual life you need is not to react.’ To be calm is the greatest asset in the world. When you are perfectly calm, time stops. There is no time, karma stops, samskāras stop. Everything becomes null and void.”
~ Robert Adams, American Non-Dualist Teacher
You can see that if your thoughts, emotions, words, and actions are habitual products of these skandhas, it could be very difficult to have a direct experience of your True Nature of ALOHA. We’re getting further and further away from our basic nature of trust, goodness, love, curiosity, humor, confidence, kindness, compassion, and oneness with all that is.
We’re becoming so serious about things. This is why many people turn to meditation and other ways to work with themselves: because they feel trapped in the constant reactions of the skandhas: wanting, not wanting, ignoring, perceiving, naming, conceptualizing, reacting emotionally.
This habitual way of being is challenging, painful, and exhausting. It’s certainly not our innate experience but one that was conditioned into us.
When we start to become aware of our thoughts and emotions, we can start to see how we react to the different ones that visit us. We want to feel happy, strong, and joyful. We don’t want to feel fear, confusion, or hatred. And we may feel pulled by the first three skandhas to believe that thoughts and emotions and how we feel as a result of them are caused by “outside” stimuli (other people and situations).
5. CONSCIOUSNESS
The 5th and final skandha is called “Consciousness” (vijñana in Sanskrit).
In Buddhism, consciousness is defined as “the knowing quality of mind.”
We’re used to saying “I am seeing,” and “I am hearing.” The sense of “I” as the observer can be the most compelling entity of all to identify with. But, in fact, there is no separate “self” having the experience of seeing or hearing. The skandha of consciousness is simply receiving a sense impression from one or more of our sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind). [More on this in the last article of this series.]
In reality, consciousness sees, consciousness hears. When we add “I,” we introduce an unnecessary element that doesn’t refer to anything that actually exists. Of course it’s fine to say “I am hearing” as a convention or to contrast with another person who is speaking or to communicate what we are doing, but we don’t need to add the word “I” when talking to ourselves about the experience of hearing or seeing…
The 5th skandha also pulls all the other skandhas together to create a whole and imagined sense of a solid separate self which infuses us to be and act in the world from that understanding.
In Closing
So, our original experience when we enter the material world is feeling free and one with vast open space, pure goodness - ALOHA. Then the conceptual mind begins to develop out of accumulated memories of pain and pleasure. Then, for the sake of feeling safe, the conceptual mind creates an identity of a separate self and a solid world made of memories that have been stored in our body’s memory databank of everything we’ve ever seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched - which could be called our conditioning. The rest of our lives is spent judging, wanting, not wanting, ignoring, organizing, categorizing, reacting emotionally and believing that this experience is all that is real and what life is supposed to be like.
The 5 skandhas come online at a very early age. The conceptual/ego mind forms somewhere around age two - noticeable with baby’s use of the word, “no.” The conceptual/ego mind doesn’t become influential, though, until around age 6 or 7. By the time its influence is fully developed and socialized, around age 25, it has become our modus operandi.
Now, the process of the 5 skandhas happens mentally in conjunction with the conceptual/ego mind on a moment to moment basis. All 5 skandhas arise and cascade in order in a millisecond in the conceptual/ego mind every time we see something, hear something, smell something, taste something, and touch something.
Ego’s interpretation of life and the world is called samsara and leads to disappointment, struggle, anxiety, depression, disturbing emotions, and suffering.
This is why so many people are seeking. What they may or may not understand is they’re seeking their own True Nature, ALOHA, in order to live a life of consistent peace, harmony, and wellbeing in the midst of samsara.
Our very foundation is ALOHA - and so It is always available as an experience. It’s always been here. We’ve just veiled ALOHA with hardline beliefs and conditioning from others - through the vehicle of the five skandhas and the conceptual/ego mind - that we’ve held onto for dear life. For decades!
I think, here, of Dorothy and her ruby shoes when the good witch says, “You’ve always been able to go home.”
The five skandhas and ego don’t really exist – they’re only a collection of tendencies and random events. And yet, the appearance of the 5 skandhas and subsequent arising of the conceptual/ego mind is quite natural in our growth as humans. Our subsequent addiction to them, though, is NOT natural.
The truth is we need the conceptual/ego mind - but only to a degree.
The Eastern path of meditation exists for the very purpose of providing skills and navigation for transcending the habit of getting “hooked” (shenpa in Tibetan) by ego’s selfish passion, aggression, and ignorance. To get there, one must first investigate whether the 5 skandhas are real or not by looking to see if they actually arise in one’s daily life experience or not.
To do that, all you have to do is heighten your self-awareness to include your thoughts, emotions, words, and actions. In just noticing them throughout each waking day - persistently - you’ll begin to notice patterns of all five skandhas.
As one practices meditation more and more and begins experiencing, feeling, and expanding into ALOHA (our heart-mind - the right brain hemisphere according to Jill Bolte Taylor), then one is able to navigate through a world lost in ego (samsara) with consistent caring, compassion, confidence, grace, kindness, and wellbeing.
Once we wake up enough to see through our confused addiction to the conceptual/ego mind (which arose out of the five skandhas), we begin to experience life like we’re standing on a scenic mountain peak and looking at the world in all directions without any obstructions. That is what the Buddha called the true nature of mind - pure, un-fabricated, unchanging awareness: ALOHA.
"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."
~ Albert Einstein
“Enlightenment is ego’s ultimate disappointment.”
~ Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
“Your mind is a beautiful servant, do not allow it to become your master.”
~ Adeep, Spiritual Practitioner
“Like a feather that is blown wherever the wind takes it, a weak and undisciplined mind is easily influenced by its environment and can be blown off the path.
Until your mind becomes like a mountain that no wind can move, take care of who you mix with, and how you spend your time.”
~ Chamtrul Rinpoche
Much of this article is sourced from the book The Path of Individual Liberation - a collection of talks by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
The next article in this five-part series is called What Is Fear and Is Fearlessness An Option?
When you are ready to explore a secular path to freedom from struggle, anxiety, depression, disturbing emotions, and suffering, consider my course: The Path Of Meditation that Leads to Living ALOHA.