1996-07_05 Vipassana Retreat, Part 5 of 8 - Q&A 13

Talk: 19960705-Larry_Rosenberg-UNK-vipassana_retreat_part_5_of_8-43309 Start_time: 01:27:22 Display_question: How do you mindfully think? Keyword_search: mindful, think, important, function, thinking, enslaved, bad, good, write, dishes, wash, aware, fresh, bored, enjoy, breaths, efficient, distraction, emotion, refrigerator, clear, noise, process, creative, silence, prepare, energy, Vipassana, Tibetan, Zen, meditation, teach, examine, understand Question_content: Questioner: …But I feel like there's this slip for me of when I feel I’m being mindful and then when I'm needing to think about something. And it's necessary to think about things. Larry: Absolutely. Questioner: Less than what I’m doing, but it's a function, important function of life. I learned how—how do you mindfully think? Larry: Yes. Yeah. No, I understand. When the time comes to think, just think. That, as you'll see, that often when you're thinking, there are other things mixed in. Just as when you're doing something else, thinking is mixed in with the other thing that—you're washing the dishes and you're thinking. Break_line: For example, let's say you have to write. Or, let's say right now. I have to think and speak. As I speak, I'm really hearing what I'm saying, as best as I can. If I don't, then it'll come out automatically. Let me give you an example. Maybe this will help. This is speaking. Maybe we can get a little bit closer to just thinking without it. I'm just working it out myself. I have to give the breath awareness instructions. I've given it probably a million times, 100,000 times, maybe a billion, I don't know. But, “come to rest in the breathing.” You've heard it already. You've heard it a lot. You just have to hear it for five days. I have to hear it almost every day. Okay. And I would say most of the time it's fresh and alive for me, but not always. When it isn't, it's an alarm. It's a signal that I'm not really mindful. Then I'm speaking just from memory, and I'm not fully there, because I've said the words so much. You can probably wake me up in my sleep and say, “How do you follow the breaths?” And I'll just start, like a tape. Break_line: But when I'm aware, even though they're the same words in one sense, they're not. It's the first time, because I'm fresh with those words. So that while I'm speaking, I'm alert, and it's a totally different feeling. I'm truly not bored with it. I enjoy it. And I'm enjoying it as I go. I don't know if you believe me, but that's to the best of my ability. And when I'm not, I know it’s, I've learned from my experience that means I'm not fully there, and so it's an alarm, and then I can correct it. I'm just thinking with thinking. Break_line: When the time comes to think, let's say you have to pay a telephone bill. You have to use the thinking process. Then 100% pay the phone bill. You'll find that you become tremendously efficient when it's time to, let's say I had to do some writing recently. You start to write, and then you can see the mind have resistance to let's say you don't get the idea correctly and it's frustrating. You try ten times to say something and none of it sounds all right. And then an emotion comes in, “I think it'll be good to take a break and go to the refrigerator now.” Or just, “oh…,” not fully facing it. But with the practice, what you can see is there's something that's distracting you, which is some emotion. Like, you're a little upset, because the writing isn't going well, or you can't say it correctly and you feel frustrated. So sometimes all it takes is a second or two, and you hear that extra and it falls away. And then the thought process, what I found is a little bit more clear, for having dealt with the noise around the thought process. But it's to when you're, now you're talking about when it is to think something through? Questioner: Right. Larry: Mhm. Questioner: I found that I would say, “No I’m not going to think about that because I should be mindful of it.” Larry: Yeah. Okay. I think I'm getting closer, but maybe I'm still not… Questioner: <inaudible> Larry: Okay, I’m just thinking, because I have to do a fair amount of thinking when you teach. And probably many of you teach, you know that. Of course, I'm using words a lot. When I prepare, let's say I have to give talks, and I have to give talks often. And probably those of you who teach, you know that. Unless it's a subject where I have to have the text with me, where it has to be word for word, because I'm doing this stuff all the time. This is how I live. My preparation is to get silent. Sometimes all I need is a few minutes before, five minutes or ten minutes, sometimes longer. And then out of the silence, it seems like even if you roughly know what you're going to say, the silence is just a wonderful preparation and somehow the thinking is just so much more clear and creative, and things come that you didn't even think of. So, silence is a very wonderful energy, and maybe we can talk a little bit about that later on. Break_line: I think the important thing that I would like to stress, based on your question is, if you go to meditation circles, certainly if you go to Vipassana circles and Zen—I don't know the Tibetan situation as well, but I assume it's probably similar—you might come away with it thinking that thinking is no good; thinking is bad. And that's not really the message. Thinking is not good or bad. The problem is, before we've examined our mind, we're enslaved to thinking, because we don't really understand what thinking is. End_time: 01:32:47