“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaize Pascal was on the money and here's why.
Next time you are on the platform waiting to catch a train, have a quick glance left and right. I can confidently assert that the vast majority of people will have their heads down, scrolling through their phones. This post isn’t about the peril of smartphones, it’s about our inability to just be (which manifests as a desire to escape digitally).
One famous study found that people would rather receive electric shocks than be stuck alone in a room with their thoughts. So why is that? What is it about our thoughts that is so disconcerting?
When you start paying close attention to your thoughts, and in my experience mindfulness meditation is particularly helpful at highlighting this, you will notice two things.
Firstly, thoughts arise on their own. We have no idea what thought we are going to have next. We think we choose our thoughts, but that ‘chooser’ is just another thought. If you don’t believe me, try to completely stop thinking for ten minutes, or only think happy thoughts for the rest of the day.
The second insight is crucial too. It’s that the vast majority - and I’m talking 90% plus here - of our thoughts are self-referential. What do I mean by that? They revolve around one of the following: ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘my’.
‘How will this affect me?’
‘I am better at X than he is’
‘That was my idea!’
This is how we all tend to experience the world: through the prism of ‘me’. These self-referential thoughts may seem harmless enough, but they actually create a tremendous amount of suffering. And a really deep insight is that the ‘me’ to which they inevitably refer doesn’t actually exist.
To be clear, I’m not saying you, or your body, don’t exist. What I am saying is, the idea and image you have about yourself, that most people believe themselves to be, is little more than a psychological phantom, and it is definitely not who you are.
If you get forensic about exploring exactly what the self-referential thoughts actually refer to, through the practice of self inquiry for example, then this becomes obvious. You eventually have to recognise that it there is no ‘me’ staring out from behind the eyes. It’s an illusion! There is an aware presence however: the same aware presence that is aware of the sight of these words right now.
Which brings us back to Blaize Pascal. When you start to unravel the multitude of strands that make up this idea of ‘me’ (things that we have unwittingly identified with including our roles, experiences, beliefs, tribal affiliations and so on), then the peaceful and subtly joyful nature of this aware presence increasingly outshines the torturous cloud of ‘I, me, my’ thoughts. You stop needing to electrocute yourself to escape the prison of your mind. You can fall in love with simply Being.
Which is why Francis of Assisi wisely said, ‘What we are looking for is what is looking’.
For my paid subscribers, I am releasing a video tomorrow about one self inquiry question you can ask yourself at any time to instantly release yourself from the trap of self referential thoughts. I bloody love it. Hope to see you there.