Something arrives in your mind that you did not want there. In the second right after, you push — you argue with it, or you try to stop it, or you try to think about something else. Shunryu Suzuki has an instruction for that second.
From Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the chapter called “Mind Waves”:
“When you are practicing zazen, do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind, and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer.”
Two things happen in that second, and Suzuki pulls them apart. A thought arrives. Then you are bothered by it. The arriving is weather. The being bothered is you taking a position against your own mind, and that is what keeps the thought in the room. Left alone, it does not stay long.
Push it out and you have to keep pushing. The push is attention, and attention is the one thing the thought was short of. You hold the thing in place with the same hand you were using to remove it, and the twenty minutes that go into that are twenty minutes spent on it.
Try hard to not be bothered and you arrive at the same place by another road. Straining to be unbothered is still a position taken against the wave. The strain gives it your afternoon.
Let it come in and let it go out and it costs nothing. Nothing is being permitted. Nothing is being approved. The wave rises and falls and you were not in the transaction.
One more voice here, because “let it go out by itself” can be heard as a technique to get good at. Sankara, an eighth-century commentator, the one with the rope and the snake. A rope in dim light taken for a snake. What removes the snake is not courage, and not a better snake. It is light. Nobody is good at recognising a rope. Suzuki is saying the same thing about the wave — it looks as though it came in from outside, and it did not; it is your own water. The thing you are braced against is not out there to be beaten. There is no getting good at seeing that.
So what are we aiming at. We want to be a mind that is not bothered by its own waves. Something rises, we see it is our own water, and it settles while we do nothing about it. Not a calm we produced. Calm that turns up when nobody is holding anything.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day.
- You are in bed and a conversation from the afternoon starts replaying itself.
- You are driving and a name comes up that you have no warm feeling about.
- You sit down to do one thing and your mind hands you something else entirely.
One thing to watch in all three: the second push. Not the arrival — the small move you make right after it, to get rid of it.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to make the thought leave. Watch what moves, and leave it as it is.