Relaxing the Conceptualizing Mind

A little story: about 25 years ago I was participating in a meditation workshop exploring thoughts. We were all led through a series of meditative exercises over the course of the morning. I felt very relaxed, present, and happy. The workshop leader then asked a question to which she made clear an answer was not expected but that asking the question could facilitate openness and curiosity to the experience in the moment. The question was ‘where do thoughts come from?’ – and even though she wasn’t looking for an answer – I had one! I didn’t offer it that day but the experience that arose with the question has stayed with me since then.

My ‘answer’ was from a slightly dreamy quality of mind that was simultaneously clear and distinct. ‘Thoughts come from the Alaya (‘store’) consciousness’. This thought took me by surprise but had a close resonance with the experience in the moment. It was clearly a conceptualization, and I was familiar with the idea from the Yogachara Buddhist tradition of the ‘alaya consciousness’ though it wasn’t one I used at all frequently.

The Alaya is said to hold mental impressions of all previous experiences, and these form the seeds of future experiences. It is a way of understanding patterns of behaviour and the momentum behind habits good and bad. It contains the idea that in the past we’ve repeated these habits many times, building up mental and emotional energy that makes them more likely to be repeated again in the present. They are the sum total of what makes us up.

So much for the idea of the alaya, back to my story – what was the actual experience like?

There was a feeling sense of experience as a mass of fragments of thoughts, impulses, and movements of mind. A kind of cosmic mental soup. I saw that some fragments rose to the surface of the mind and were identifiable or distinguishable – not as content but as experience. Others didn’t quite make it to the surface of full consciousness. There was a knowing that the more visible moments had more energy behind them. They were habitual drives and the strongest of them eventually would get expressed for good or ill. The literal seeing felt like the birth of a thought.

Something stayed with me from the short period this meditative experience lasted – some glimmering of an understanding of the nature of the mind and the mental objects within it.

I think about this experience infrequently and yet it came into consciousness during a recent meditation. It was the first time I’d sat for a few days as I’d been unwell with Covid. I still felt weak and breathless but wanted to get back to formal practice. My mind was all over the place, there were lots of thoughts but not enough energy to get involved with them or to be aware of individual arisings.

I found myself dropping in a practice instruction I often give at the end of a retreat when retreatants are about to leave the fairly low ‘conceptual load’ of retreat conditions and return to the ‘high conceptual load’ of daily life. The mental and emotional weight of making decisions large and small, various meetings, talking and using tech takes a lot of energy. The instruction is to find times to ‘rest back from the conceptualizing mind’ and prioritize the awareness mind by doing nothing.

This small thought really opened up my soggy covid brain into spaciousness and ease and a different relationship to mental activity. I was aware of thoughts and other mental movements but from a stance of lightness and brightness. There was a kind of relaxation and release from grasping onto detail and trying to make meaning from the illusive threads of experience. And it was possible to just stay there enjoying it.

When we sit without doing anything in particular there are times when doubts can arise about how we’re practicing, especially when experience isn’t pleasant. The voices of the conceptualizing mind can shout loudly driving us towards the more active ‘doing’ mode. ‘Shouldn’t I be doing something to change whatever is happening now?’. ‘I’ll never get anywhere with practice unless I use more effort’. The thinking mind has these thoughts and a thousand more. But are they true?

At these times we need to hold our nerve. Keep pointing true north. Is awareness present? Is right view/a dharma perspective present? Keep recognizing the conceptualizing thinking mind with its habits and its tendency to dominate other modes of being. Let the Awareness mode grow. Enjoy it. Appreciate it. You don’t know what it will grow into or what habits it will grow out of. It could bring in its wake a tide of ease or a transformative understanding. Keep going.