Lost in thought

Thinking, busyness, and resisting the sense of possibility and aliveness

The spiritual teacher Adyeshanti grew up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s. When he about seven or eight years old, he started to notice that the adults around him were prone to suffering, pain, and conflict. One day he had an epiphany: “Adults believe what they think! That’s why they suffer! They actually believe the thoughts in their head!” As he relates in his book, “Falling into Grace”:

All of a sudden, I had an understanding of what was happening when adults communicated with one another; that what people were in fact communicating were their thoughts, and that each person believed that what they thought was actually true. The problem was that all of the different adults had different ideas about what they thought the truth was, and so when they communicated there was this unspoken negotiation, this attempt to win each other over and to defend one’s thinking and beliefs.

As I continued to observe how adults believed their thinking, it struck me, “They’re insane! I understand them now: They’re insane. It’s insane to believe the thoughts in your head.”

It became very clear that one of the primary reasons we suffer is because we believe what we think, that the thoughts in our heads come uninvited into our consciousness, swirl around, and we attach to them.

The inner thoughts we grow up believing, the thoughts we grasp onto, fight about, have conflict and hurt each other about, are only ideas put in us by culture. And those ideas in our heads: we think it’s us. We believe it’s our core identity. The great Krishnamurti makes the astounding statement:

“You think you’re thinking your thoughts. You are not. You are thinking the culture’s thoughts.” - Krishnamurti

And the strange ahistorical culture we’re in¹ centers around individualism, capitalism, and a materialistic, mechanical view of the world. Workism and consumerism are the thoughts we’re thinking without realizing it. Those twin engines of capitalism fuel our addiction to not-enoughness, our superficiality, and our race to environmental destruction.

But we’re something much larger, a vast space in which our thoughts are only a small part of. As Ram Dass said:

Beyond all polarities
I am
Let the judgments and opinions of the mind
Be judgments and and opinions of the mind
And you exist behind that

Lost in thought

I spent most of my life wanting to be “smart.” To do well in school. Get a “good job.” Now after financial freedom, I have a little distance, I see all those urges as part of running the rat race. The only reason you want to be smart, do well in school, and get a good job is a basic insecurity. If I don’t, I’ll be a failure, practically but also existentially.

I’ve realized something even more basic, something so simple that we don’t understand the implications of it: capitalism rewards thinking. In turn, it deemphasizes caring. As capitalism absorbs more and more of culture, and take up more and more of our personal time, it’s happening to us too.

Look at the salaries of thinking professions (finance, management, engineering) versus caring professions (teaching, nursing, elder care).² Ever thought about who gets paid more, and why? The most “successful” people I know are in thinking jobs.

Are you a “successful” person? How much of your job is about thinking versus caring?

There are two dangers to this type of “success”: First, you’re spending your life hours in a disembodied experience. Most “successful” people I know are in their heads all day. They spend 8-10 hours at a desk engaged in mental activity. They might “get a workout in” at the end of day. During breaks, they’re on the phone, responding to texts, reading news, scrolling through social media and I suspect “successful” people spend more. The average human spends over 7 hours a day, almost half their waking life, in front of a screen. How is that not an addiction? To spend 35 years of waking life front of a TV, computer, or phone is a poverty of presence. And most of the time, we think we’re enjoying it. That is a loss of life.

Second, you’re being rewarded for reinforcing and reproducing capitalist thought. Remember that we’re only thinking culture’s thoughts.³ By thinking so much about how to make an impact, how to scale, how to be more effective, or be “better,” we’re just reproducing an industrial improvement worldview where nothing is good enough and everything has to be improved and made bigger. And the hamster wheel is infinite: if you do this well, you’ll be rewarded for it. Then you’ll simply create a world of this for yourself and others. And you'll think it's success.

“While numbing (or compensatory sensation seeking) may make life tolerable, the price you pay is that you lose awareness of what is going on inside your body and, with that, the sense of being fully, sensually alive.” — Bessel van der Kolk

Most people I know are exhausted by thinking. But they actually afraid of getting off the treadmill, because, when they do, they encounter the difficult sensations they’ve been tamping down while staying in their heads.

But thinking is disconnection from ourselves, from others, and from God. It’s part of our addiction to our not-enoughness. Our dissatisfaction with ourselves is the root of trying so hard to be “effective,” for “measuring,” and for “improving.”

What is wealth?

The first lesson in FF1 asked the simple question:

Over the years, FF students have never really written about wealth in terms of money. Some responses:

Wealth is a full practice of health, happiness, creativity, and mutual benefit. Wealth is intimate self awareness and a state of flow. Wealth is community— an abundance of people to remember their birthdays, sit with their wounds, and mirror back their beauty. Lusciousness and pleasure. Wealth is the ability to get 8+ hours of sleep every night. Wealth is the opposite of resentment. Wealth is time. Time for naps, time for walks, time for cooking, time for laughing, time for stillness, time for nature. Wealth is spacious in your schedule and time to just be human. Wealth is the ability to be more in their bodies.

Lovely, isn’t it? Again, it’s never about money. Once you have enough money, all these other things open abundantly to you. You get to indulge in all these things that truly satisfy us. But in our society, we don’t really know what is wealth or what is enough. So we sacrifice wealth in order to get more money.

Remember the thoughts in our head are simply capitalist culture? Note that nothing my students describe wealth has anything to do with do with more thinking. Because you’re not forced to work, financial freedom is mental liberation as well. Not only can you think what you want, but you don’t have to think at all. It’s a chance to become more than just the thoughts in your head and become an embodied aliveness and presence in the world.

Acting naturally

Wu-wei is the core concept of Chinese philosophy.⁴

Wu-wei is the ideal of effortless action. Acting without trying or without thinking. Being in the flow of life, as opposed to working against the stream. Again, notice the student descriptions of wealth above. All of it: community, sleep, time, laughing, remembering, is a natural ease with life. None of it is thought. According to wu-wei, wealth is getting past thought.

'I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.' - John O’Donohue

In capitalism, we work through (against?) life instead of letting life work through us. We need to let go of our Western conditioning of so much thinking, so much efforting, so much trying-to-get-what-I-want-so-I-can-be-happy. So little time for spaciousness and feeling. I only found the time and acceptance of what was happening in my body once I left the work world. I was shut off because for decades I was rewarded and praised for being shut off. Nowadays, feeling into my body is not always a pleasant experience. Unwanted feelings up come, and after years of repressing them, it is often a difficult experience. But it’s an increased intimacy with what is happening within me. What has always been happening with me but have always ignored. An increased intimacy with my own life.

"It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be." Cheryl Strayed

Capitalism is about knowing everything. Wu-wei is coming to a state of not-knowing anything. You have to let go of knowing and surrender all the thoughts and ideas that you thought were you. In only that state of deep not-knowing, does life really happen.

I’ve spent many years learning how to fix life, only to discover at the end of the day that life is not broken.

There is a hidden seed of greater wholeness in everyone and everything. We serve life best when we water it and befriend it. When we listen before we act. 

In befriending life, we do not make things happen according to our own design.

We uncover something that is already happening in us and around us and create conditions that enable it.

Everything is moving toward its place of wholeness always struggling against odds.

Everything has a deep dream of itself and its fulfillment. - Rabbi Rachel Naomi Remen

What's holding you back?

I listened to Esther Perel in a Zoom chat last week talk about eros, the creative force and vibrancy we seem to be losing in modern life. Beyond stability, she says, we yearn for something else, a sense of possibility, aliveness, and life force.⁵ But what blocks us from that? Trauma, yes. But even we haven't experienced trauma,⁶ our culture of work, busyness, and consumerism means we don't have the time to experience eros:

What’s holding you back from this [sense of alive possibility]? The structure of your everyday life. It's very difficult to feel desire and the creative eros if you're feeling overwhelmed with your schedule. — Esther Perel

In order to feel vibrant alive, we need to do less. Have less. Surrender our need to control everything. To be successful. Perhaps even to make a difference.

“If you could naught yourself for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all.” — Meister Eckhart

Let the judgments and opinions of the mind be judgments and and opinions of the mind. Let go of efforting and grasping. Rejoice in the wealth that you already have. Make time for it. Be with wu-wei. If we could let life happen, and in true humility, trust that the world is unfolding as it should, we might find that grace is happening, has always been happening.

This is the wealth we’ve always wanted. The world is wilder, more sacred, and more unknown and alive than you can imagine.

This is our inheritance.

Financial Freedom 1

Last call: Financial Freedom 1 starts next week. Happy to answer any questions about it if you email me.

1. Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic. WEIRD people are highly individualistic, focused on personal growth, and analytical. Non-weird cultures are much more communal.

2. BTW, “profession” means “to speak to.” We’re “speaking to” thinking over caring.

3. Much of that thought is fear and anxiety.

4. Both of the main traditions of Chinese philosophy, Confucianism and Taoism, is about getting to wu-wei.

5. I assert that financial independence gives you both stability and freedom.

6. 70% of us have?