Big Mind

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Big Mind — Watching the mind work is how we prepare to live in the moment. Here are some examples of simply watching.

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Do you ever think about how you think? I mean, do you watch your­self do it? (…get your mind out of the gut­ter… the top­ic is think­ing, not doing it …)

It seems to me that there are lev­els of thought,
and help­ful ways and non-help­ful ways
to address our thinking.

Let me talk about obser­va­tion, then tell you a cou­ple of brief sto­ries that illus­trate what I mean.

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Mind and Mind Processes

I’ve talked about how our minds func­tion. A lot. It’s a key theme in Bud­dhism and a vital focus in meditation.

We might have the idea, for exam­ple, that med­i­ta­tion is about “not think­ing.” But this is clear­ly impos­si­ble. Think­ing is what our minds do.

My sense of “Big Mind” is that our goal is to “see” our­selves as we think. But first, about thinking.

We all fol­low the same pat­tern. Let’s assume that there actu­al­ly is a real­i­ty out there. (Can’t prove it, but hey…) This is the idea behind the clas­sic ques­tion, “If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?” Answer: no way to know.

That’s because there is no sound until it reg­is­ters on one’s ear. Think 😉 about it. Even if you leave a record­ing device in the woods, and a tree falls, the only proof it made a sound is when the sound a) hits a human ear, and b) is iden­ti­fied as the sound of a tree falling. Any­thing else is a con­ve­nient conjecture.

This is the pat­tern regard­ing every­thing. Some­thing has to hit some­one’s sens­es, or be cre­at­ed in some­one’s head (The Bud­dhist 6th sense is mind.) In the lat­ter case, a thought aris­es in the mind, and then is inter­pret­ed by the cre­ator. Only then does it have “mean­ing.”

Not how we were brought up, eh?

We were brought up to fol­low the beliefs (inter­pre­ta­tions) of our fam­i­lies and tribes. And the most com­mon is that exter­nal events “cause” reac­tions inside of us. This is the “He made me angry!” myth. Or, the oth­er day, a friend wrote, “Some­thing hap­pened that trig­gered my anxiety.”

Not so.

An event hap­pened. It reg­is­tered in the mind. An eval­u­a­tion (judge­ment) was made. Then, the mind searched for sim­i­lar events (minds cat­e­go­rize events accord­ing to the cat­e­gories you cre­ate (angry-mak­ing, anx­i­ety-mak­ing, etc.) The new expe­ri­ence (which had no intrin­sic mean­ing until you “named it,” is added to the list, and then, the mind trig­gers the attached emotion. 

Again, the event was neu­tral until some­one named it, judged it, labelled, and added on an emo­tion­al response, which was then blamed for the situation. 

When we med­i­tate, we can actu­al­ly watch this process hap­pen: we sit there, the mind gets bored and throws up the thought “Med­i­ta­tion is bor­ing.” The Mind then wants to add more exam­ples, res­ur­rect the excru­ci­at­ing feel­ing of bore­dom, etc.

Instead, as the Mind says “bor­ing,” we silent­ly say “think­ing” or “judg­ing.” And we detach from that (we don’t fol­low it.) We go back to “just sitting.”

Weird­ly, it is the same mind that thinks, judges, and the mind that observes, and the mind that lets go. Once you get that, you’ve expe­ri­enced Big Mind.

The Big Mind cre­ates, and a mil­lisec­ond lat­er, it judges, and a mil­lisec­ond lat­er it can choose to let go. Dar­bel­la and I do this by catch­ing our lan­guage. So, “He makes me angry” becomes “I am choos­ing to anger myself.” Etc.

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Story 1:

Dar­bel­la and I have a favourite niece (and, I always say, our only niece…) who soon turns 40! Back when Lisa was 16 we took her on a short road trip to the U S of A. On the way home, we stopped at Nia­gara Falls. She’d nev­er seen the Falls, despite nev­er liv­ing more than 2 hours away. 

Any­way, we walked a bit and end­ed up choos­ing to have lunch in a Japan­ese restau­rant. Lisa would not even look at the sushi that Dar and I were hav­ing, let alone try a piece. She swore up and down that raw fish would nev­er cross her lips.

A decade lat­er we took Lisa out for din­ner. At a sushi restau­rant in Toron­to. Her choice. She quite likes sushi (and sake, if truth be told.)

Here’s the first point. At 16, Lisa did not like sushi. At 26, she did. Lisa’s orig­i­nal sto­ries about sushi (“I’ll NEVER eat sushi!”) are obvi­ous­ly mean­ing­less. She did­n’t like sushi, until she did.

Which is pretty much the way it actually goes, for everything. Think bike riding, driving a car, sex…

And of course it goes both ways. Things I love (think ex-part­ners) can turn into things I hate. And here’s the hard part:

The sushi is the same through­out.
The part­ner is the same, through­out,
The sex act is the same, through­out…
What changes is how we describe it to ourselves.

Story 2:

We were watch­ing TV after a thun­der­storm. Some­one got a video of a light­ning strike. The bolt hit a chim­ney, explod­ed it (debris cir­cle was 10 feet or so) and then the elec­tric­i­ty trav­elled to the ground, found a pipe, slid along the pipe to the third house down, exit­ed the base­ment wall, blow­ing a hole in it, explod­ing the con­trol on the wash­er, and set­ting the clothes in the laun­dry room on fire.

Now I have to admit that was a new one for me.
I commented, “Holy crap! Amazing!”

But what “struck me” was the diver­gent reac­tions of the peo­ple involved. 

• The guy with the laun­dry room fire was bemused and smirking. 
• The wife with the blown chim­ney was “shak­en and disturbed.” 
• Her hus­band was giv­ing tours of his back­yard, tak­ing obvi­ous delight in the atten­tion while rev­el­ling in the odd places he was find­ing bricks.

Here’s the question: what was the “correct” response?

Story 3:

In Zen Mind, Begin­ner’s Mind, by Shun­ryu Suzu­ki, he writes,

“A won­der­ful paint­ing is the result of the feel­ing in your fin­gers. If you have the feel­ing of the thick­ness of the ink in your brush, the paint­ing is already there before you paint. When you dip your brush into the ink you already know the result of your draw­ing, or you can­not paint. So, before you do some­thing, “being” is there, the result is there.”

I start­ed paint­ing when I was 14 or so. I’m an OK artist; used to get A’s in Col­lege Paint­ing Class­es, did some shows, but I liked pho­tog­ra­phy bet­ter. After I retired, I real­ly got into paint­ing again. 

I paint most­ly peo­ple — street scenes, nudes, por­traits. And I am work­ing on a new one a few days ago.

The thing is, I make tilt­ed heads into an issue.

I’ve noticed this before. As you can like­ly see, I draw a grid to enlarge the image from my tablet to the can­vas. I then lay out the image in pencil.

Straight head, no issue. If, how­ev­er, the head is tilt­ed, MY head and hand work to straight­en lips and noses and eyes.

I know I’m prone to do it, and it hap­pens anyway. 

This morn­ing I walked past the paint­ing, real­ly looked at the fea­tures, and imme­di­ate­ly paint­ed them out. I revis­it­ed the fea­tures and drew them in what I hope is cor­rect­ly. I won’t know until I add paint. 

So, how was I seeing the photograph, which painting was I painting, and how did I get so off track for 2 days?

It’s a mys­tery. Beat­ing up on myself would be a nor­mal reac­tion, but I judge it to be non-help­ful. Paint­ing out the mis­takes and get­ting it right the sec­ond ot 10th time seems more “awake.”

My point with these three sto­ries is that our minds are trained to label and judge, when our focus might bet­ter be put on doing. 

“I do not eat sushi NOW” is so.
“I eat sushi NOW” is also so.
“I will nev­er eat sushi” is a waste of ener­gy, and in this case, not so.

The light­ning strike is a light­ning strike. Now I know one can set laun­dry on fire, in the base­ment three doors away. 

Is this good, bad, ter­ri­fy­ing, inter­est­ing, delight­ful? No, it’s a light­ning strike. The rest is just our minds, blow­ing things out of proportion.

My paint­ing exist­ed in my head until my hands did their thing. The paint­ing is as it is, and was as it was, crooked and hope­ful­ly soon to be straight.

I can say noth­ing of how it will be, as it is not oth­er than it is, right now. You may like it, hate it, or be indif­fer­ent.
That is about you, not about the painting.

This week, watch your mind, as it takes stuff in, cre­ates stuff, directs your hands. 

• Notice how often you talk about doing some­thing, and do not do something. 
• Notice how quick­ly your mind goes to judgement—good, bad, indifferent. 
• Notice how the labels are all about you, and have noth­ing what­so­ev­er to do with the thing you are judging.

Think, design, and do. Think, design, and do. Drop the pre­tense, the delays, and the judge­ments, again and again. Things are as they are, not as you judge them to be. Bet­ter to have the expe­ri­ence than to spend your life play­ing with your judgements.

Shock­ing, eh?

P.S. I fixed the painting!

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