The Practice of Not Thinking

A Thinking Disease

• By thinking we can become ignorant
• Withdrawing into our brain decreases our power of concentration
• The three disturbing emotions: desire, anger, and uncertainty
• Keeping your sense active helps maintain a balanced state of mind
• Satisfying your mind by responding to your senses

How to Control Your Body and Your Mind

Steps to eliminate frustration and uncertainty

Speaking

• Observe the tone of your voice as a basis for speech
• Arrogance prompts you to talk back to people
• Practise eliminating your negative thoughts
• When apologizing, offer specific suggestions for improvement
• Self-serving excuses will only inflict more pain on the other person
• A sincere apology from the heart will ease the other person's pain
• Short- and long-term interests misconstrued by the brain
• Speaking ill of others will eventually darken your heart
• Does continuous lying make us less intelligent
• Don't force others to listen to your idle talk or gossip
• The Japanese disease of saying thank you too often will distort the mind
• Modulation and variety are needed to express gratitude

Listening

Buddhist mediation is essentially the practice of using the state of concentration achieved while meditating as a tool to observe the movements of one's mind.

• Don't be "brainwashed" by sounds; be aware of what's going on - It's never a good idea to keep listening to shouts, screams, or other sounds of anguish. Besides violent sounds, it's also probable that a person who is continuously screaming at other people will negatively influence you.
• Sharpen your awareness by focusing on impermanence - Make it a habit not to rely on sounds that are highly stimulating. Be alert. Don't ignore your surroundings. Lend an ear to voices and other sounds that do not stimulate your emotions of desire or anger. Instead try to generate a neutral feeling inside you.
• Open your ears to the sounds of the world and your world will change
• Communication basics: Observe the signals of pain released by others - What's most important is to see and accept the person's feelings. Focus on the pitch of their voice, the speed of their speech and changes in their breathing as well as what they're saying. All miscommunication between individuals is based on the delusion that the other person is experiencing emotional relief, if not a sense of pleasure, at our expense.
• When criticized, look for pain in the one who criticizes and give yourself room to breathe - To stop hurting yourself with the poison that we call anger, you must stop processing information when it comes into your head. By making a habit of careful observation and analysis, you'll learn to deal calmly with unpleasant situations without increasing the anger that is trying to build up in your own mind.
• The practice of stopping manipulative information from entering your mind - Once we start to break away from the habit of instantly responding to sounds and learn to remain calm, we will be able to acknowledge that those sounds, whether pleasant or unpleasant, are simply stimulating our sense of hearing.

The Strange Relationship Between the Brain and the Mind

• I watch the flow of my awareness over long periods of time. I can see that my mind is working continually and at tremendous speed. It moves around incredibly quickly, processing information, and travels on to inputs from my senses, and these actions take place in no more than split fragments of a second. It's during these brief moments that information is processed. The mind may flit from listening to thinking, listening, watching, and back to listening again, and so on - what's passing through our mind is a colossal amount of information that includes a vast mass of things that are often completely irrelevant.
• Our thinking starts to get out of control
• Many people start to talk about how quickly time seems to be going by as they get older. This is because the noise created by the thoughts that they have carefully preserved in their mind over time accumulates and blocks any new information that tries to enter. And I feel that it's often when that noise achieves a complete victory over the sense of reality that people might start to become senile in old age. Because they become solely controlled by information from the past and unable to accept new realities, they may even see a grandchild, recognize him as their son, and be unable to correct the misconception.
• The more we overwork a particular part of our brain, the less we're able to perceive physical information, and the more "ignorant" or confused we become.
• Not thinking in a way that tires you, thinking only the most appropriate thoughts in a particular moment, eliminating unrestrained thoughts and ideas that go around and around in your mind, and overcoming your kleshas. These are the challenges we face as we begin our journey in Buddhism, and they're also the goals that we aim to achieve.
• In Buddhism, the ability to become aware is called the power of the will. The will refers to our ability to recognize things, like a sensor for awareness.
• We concentrate, control our awareness, grab hold of it and focus on it in a single location. It means gathering up and bringing together in one place the scattered thoughts that flit through our mind at lightning speed.