21. The Power of Thought

Almost everything you experience is the product of thought. Just look around you at the evidence of civilization. Look at how the natural world has been pruned, and modified. Thought is almost everything. It’s science, art, religion, philosophy, technology, every social pathology, racism, tribal hatred, corporate greed, all of human activity from the most constructive, like finding a cure for a disease like smallpox, to the most destructive, like a weaponizing a disease, like smallpox is the product of what human beings like ourselves, think.

Look around you at all the objects and materials that you use on a daily basis, and upon which you now depend for your survival. If civilization were to end tomorrow, could you produce any of these things? If you were alone in the world, in the state of nature, how long would it take for you to produce a single needle and thread with a lifetime, be enough? Now imagine what it would take to produce a smartphone, what is the minimum number of people required to move from taking the raw materials out of the earth, and refining them into glass and plastic and electronic components, and then developing the principles of computation and memory storage necessary to build a smartphone.

Almost everything around us is pregnant with human knowledge.

human knowledge is literally built into the walls of your house and into your clothing. No single person knows how to produce most of what we depend on. This knowledge is distributed. We’re all living in an ever expanding and deepening system of ideas. This is the power of thought.

But within our own minds, we tend to live under a kind of tyranny, of thinking. And we have a false sense that there’s a thinker. In addition to thoughts themselves, you may feel that you’re the thinker, using thoughts, or authoring them. But the self is a construct of thought. The feeling of self is what it feels like to be thinking in each moment, without recognizing the arising of the next thought. And one would be very hard pressed to think of a source of suffering. That isn’t the direct product of this process. Certainly everything coming from our relationships, and careers, and concerns about the past and future is mediated by thought, even our response to pain. direct physical pain, is largely the product of how we think about it.

Pain is one thing, suffering is another, the resistance we feel the anxiety, the fear of how things will hurt in the next moment. This too, is the product of thought. Of course, getting rid of thought is not an option. The only way to plan for the future, the only way to act intelligently, in response to present challenges is in the general case to think things through.

But use suffering itself as a kind of alarm clock. And this is where meditation can be useful. Meditation gives you an ability to respond to the alarm.

If you are suffering, you are lost in thought. And until you learn a practice like mindfulness, there is no alternative. You will live at the whim of the next sentence or image that appears in your mind. Once you understand how to meditate, however, once you can pay attention to this automaticity then you have a choice.

So when you’re suffering, just notice the present thought. Where is it? What is it? What happens to it when you pay attention? And how is it that your suffering can continue in the next moment when the present thought has disappeared?