You Can’t Stop Thoughts… But You Can Stop Suffering

You can’t stop thoughts appearing. But you don’t have to suffer them

In this article, I want to write about how the mind works:

• where thoughts come from
• exactly why we suffer
• how you can’t stop thoughts
• why it’s impossible to experience lasting peace of mind
• how most people are looking for solutions where they can’t be found
• and why self-understanding is the key to ongoing peace

When I teach mindfulness classes, the very first exercise we do is called “Recognising the Restless Mind.”

The instructions are really simple—for a minute or two, make the conscious decision to sit and do absolutely nothing. Experience what it’s like to sit there doing nothing.

After a minute or so, I ring the bell and ask people what their experience was.

Everyone, without exception, says that, despite their decision to do absolutely nothing, the mind remained active throughout.

Random thoughts, ideas, images, etc. kept popping into their heads.

What does this tell us about the mind?

It tells us that, although you can make the conscious decision not to move the body, the mind will continue to do its own thing regardless. Thoughts will continue to appear by themselves and we have no control over it.

You can’t stop thoughts from happening. They appear by themselves and fade away by themselves.

In mindfulness, this constantly flowing river of self-arising thoughts is called the undercurrent.

As well as the undercurrent, there’s another part of the mind which is constantly active. You could call it the observer.

It’s the one that knows what is going on. It knows what’s going on in the undercurrent, unless we are distracted, in which case, this knowing quality is lost. We’ll come back to the observer later.

You Can’t Stop Thoughts or Change the Undercurrent

The undercurrent is autonomous. It manifests by itself without any input or any intention from us. And not only do thoughts continually appear by themselves, they also fade by themselves, to be constantly replaced by new ones.

New thoughts, which we have no control over, are constantly popping into our awareness and grabbing our attention.

This is why it’s so difficult to settle the mind and why lasting peace of mind can never be found. (Peace can be found but not on the level of the mind).

As the Indian Master, Nisargadatta said, “There is no such thing as peace of mind. Mind itself is disturbance.”

So Where Does the Undercurrent Come From?

If you observe the undercurrent closely, you’ll see that it never comes up with anything new. It plays the same old records over and over on repeat.

Essentially, it is a recording of all the past experiences and impressions we’ve gathered and stored throughout our lives (and, if you believe the Hindus and Buddhists, in past lives too ).

The undercurrent is very much like a computer program that plays over and on autopilot, determining, in most people, how they react and interact with the world around them.

And here’s the interesting part. Since the undercurrent is a manifestation of the past , it can’t be changed, at least not through direct intervention

It’s important to understand this, otherwise you can spend years looking for solutions where they can’t be found

And thankfully, this doesn’t mean that change isn’t possible or that peace can’t be found.

We just need to be clear about what can be changed and what can’t.

Peace, joy, happiness etc can be found through changing the way the observer interacts with the undercurrent.

The Observer

Like the undercurrent, the observer is ever-present.

It knows what’s going on in the undercurrent and in the world around us.

It’s the part of us that we think of as “me”.

Most people, when asked “how are you?” will quickly scan the content of the undercurrent and report what’s going on there.

If there are bright thoughts, feelings or emotions manifesting, they’ll say “I’m well.”

If there are dark clouds passing through, they’ll report that they are having a rough day.

Not many people will say “the mind is full of neurotic thoughts but I’m doing well!”

The main reasons we suffer is because we judge and reject the content of the mind and take it to be who we are

So there are two things going on; the self-arising undercurrent happening by itself and this strong sense of self that’s intensely interested in the content.

There’s a character, who I like to call the thought traffic policeman, who stands waist deep in the middle of the stream, thrashing about as he tries to control the self-arising thought traffic.

A happy thought comes round the bend in the river and, meeting with his approval, is allowed to pass without resistance.

Then a sad or anxious thought or feeling spontaneously appears and now he’s up in arms, frantically resisting as he slaps a bad/wrong/ undesirable label on them.

And this is where 95% of our suffering comes from—not from the thoughts, feeling and emotions themselves, which arise without any intention or input from ourselves, but from our unconscious reactions to them.

We suffer to the extent that we resist the thoughts, feelings and emotions that are self-arising.

We suffer because we are compulsively pre-occupied with the content of the undercurrent and are constantly asking ourselves “Do I like this or not.”

The problem is very evident. Our happiness or unhappiness is dictated by something we have little or no control over.

You Can’t Stop Thoughts But You Can Change Your Response

So, what to do?

Peace can never be found within the undercurrent itself. The mind is restless by nature and can never be settled… or not for long anyway.

What you can settle is the observer.

Instead of being unconsciously tossed around by our likes and dislikes, by the ups and downs, the ebbs and flows of the river, we can learn not to get involved.

We can train ourselves to sit quietly on the riverbank watching, without feeling the compulsion to leap into the stream every time something that is not to our liking comes round the bend in the river.

One of my teachers used to say “You suffer because you are open for business”. And this is exactly what he meant.

In truth, you don’t need to get involved with the minds incessant activity.

And this is the way to find peace.

You’ll never find it through trying to iron the river.

There are two paths to finding peace and fulfilment.

There’s the path of self-improvement which stems from the belief that ‘I’m not acceptable as I am’ —in other words, the content of the river is not to my liking. Trying to fix ourselves can take years and years.

A much quicker, much more effective path, in my view, is the path of self-understanding—understanding that you don’t need to iron the river to find peace.

Peace comes from two things: non-resistance and non-identification.