The Human Problem Of Overthinking

Many of us are playing ping pong, or tennis with the mind. The mind hits a thought to you over the net and you fire back, dearly hoping to hit a wonderful winner which ends the game forever. It never happens like that. The problem of mind is not solved with more mind. You will never hit that final winner, how do you end the game forever? DROP THE RACKET!

Come along and find out how to drop your racket and don't play the mind's game.

Transcript

Hello,

A Zen master was giving a talk and one of the students shouted out,

Master,

Master,

Can you tell us the human problem?

What is it?

Why do we suffer so much?

And the master just gave a typical Zen master's response,

Just shook his head and chuckled to himself.

He'd been talking about the human problem since day one,

But this student obviously hadn't heard it.

He just said,

Three words,

Caught in thought.

When I came across that,

I thought what a wonderful way,

A beautiful,

Elegant way of expressing a truth or the truth of the human problem.

We all know that we're caught in thought in one way or another,

But we don't know what to do about it.

We know what we'd like,

We'd like the mind just to shut up,

Just to keep quiet.

But it doesn't,

And wishing it away doesn't help.

So let me give you a metaphor.

One way we keep this overthinking mind alive,

The mind that judges and criticizes and just narrates all day long.

It's like a game of tennis.

It's like the mind is lobbing a ball over the net and what we do is we hit it back and then it hits it back to us and we're playing tennis.

It's like playing tennis with the mind.

Sometimes it can seem like the mind is throwing or batting three or four balls over the net at once.

It's just too much.

We're trying to get them back and you know,

We're opposing the mind.

We're hoping that we make this perfect shot that ends the game.

We've won.

The mind has gone quiet,

But it never happens in that way.

How do you stop that game of tennis with the mind?

How do you stop that game?

How do you end it?

Drop the racket.

That's what we need to do.

We need to learn to drop the racket.

But it's just so tempting to keep on battling with the mind because at some point I must win.

I must work this out and we never do.

See,

The mind is an instrument.

It's a wonderful instrument.

It's creative.

It creates works of art,

Feats of engineering,

Cues for diseases.

Wonderful.

But it also creates something else.

It's double-edged.

It also creates suffering in a form of what I call self-centered thinking.

In Buddhism we call it Papancha,

Which is a wonderful word.

You can really sort of punch it out.

Papancha means this tendency to overthink and catastrophize and that narrative in the head which we believe is our life.

This narrative in my head is my life.

It isn't.

It's a narrative in the head.

It's just thoughts.

You're not a thought.

You are aware of those thoughts.

The thoughts end.

The thoughts change.

You don't.

You're there witnessing thoughts.

But what we do,

We fixate on the thoughts and as a case of mistaken identity,

We take our identity from the thinking.

Our identity is somehow mixed up with thought in the world of thought,

In the world of thinking.

So,

How do we put the racket down?

We're going to have a short meditation here just to illustrate how we do this.

And the less we do,

The better.

Before we do the meditation,

Let's just explore in a slightly different way.

Let's say that the mind is a living thing.

In a sense it is.

It's an energy system.

But where does it get its energy from?

What keeps it going?

What keeps it alive?

What keeps it alive?

Why doesn't it just die down and be able to be used for practical and creative purposes?

Why doesn't it just go to rest?

Well,

What's feeding this Papancha,

This constant narrative?

What's feeding it is you.

Your attention is its food.

That's what's feeding it.

That's why it keeps.

.

.

It's almost like downloading these thoughts,

Batting these thoughts over to you,

Because it wants you to bat it back.

That's what it wants.

That's its intention,

So to speak.

Yeah,

I'm just,

You know,

Just sort of taking a bit of leeway with it here.

Yeah,

We're just playing with a metaphor.

That's what keeps it alive.

The wrong kind of attention.

There's two types of attention.

There's the one where your attention.

.

.

See,

You're just here now listening.

You're attentive to this.

Some of the time.

Other times you'll be thinking about something else lost in the world of thought,

Or what I call a virtual reality.

So,

We are here.

You're here,

Aware.

You're paying attention.

Now what happens is a thought comes along,

Yeah,

Or the mind bats over a thought,

Over the net,

And you,

Once it's seen,

Your attention collapses into the thought,

Into the story.

You see what's happening,

And then the content of that thought,

Or that narrative,

Becomes your reality.

It feels real.

Why does it feel real?

Because once you're lost in it,

Then there's the capability,

Or the capacity,

For emotion to arise.

Let's say the anxious thoughts,

Or angry thoughts,

Or frustrating thoughts.

Then an emotion is created,

And it follows,

Like the thought is the horse,

And the emotion is the cart.

It follows the emotion.

So,

If your mind is turbulent,

What follows is a turbulent emotions.

Then it feels real,

Until you pop out of that world,

And back to reality.

There's nothing happening.

Let's do a short exercise before we meditate.

Later,

Close your eyes for me.

I'd like to imagine a table in front of you,

With a big,

Juicy melon.

You can see its dimples,

The colour of the melon.

I want you to pick it up.

There's something satisfying about holding a melon.

There's a robustness to it,

There's weight to it,

There's a wholeness to it.

I want you to tap it.

You can hear it,

You can feel it.

I want you to put it back down on the table.

And now,

Next to the melon,

Is a knife.

I want you to pick the knife up,

And rest it on top of the melon.

You can feel the resistance.

You're going to slowly cut through the melon,

And it falls apart.

And you see its juicy,

Juiciness.

The inside glistening.

Oh,

Look at that.

Oh,

Beautiful.

You're going to pick one half up,

And you're going to smell it.

You're going to start licking it.

And the juice is now running down your hand,

It drips onto your shirt,

Down your chin,

And you start biting and licking into it.

Gorgeous,

Sweet.

And just then,

You drop,

You accidentally drop the melon onto your lap.

Ah,

Open your eyes.

Look around the room.

What's happening?

Nothing.

What about the juice down your,

Down your hand?

Have you wiped it off?

And on your chin?

You better go hang a chief and wipe it off.

Not there.

Of course.

Where's the melon?

Of course.

Where's the melon now?

It was never there.

It was all imagined.

But you could,

You could feel certain sort of responses to that melon.

Yeah.

Now,

What if that was a story or images of something anxious or fearful?

Something regretful?

You have a similar response,

But then you feel anxious.

So,

Of course,

We take that mental world to be real.

We actually take it to be more real than this world when we're lost in it.

So,

You see the power of the imagination when it's not used wisely.

It creates suffering.

There,

It created the experience of eating a melon.

I do that exercise with other things,

Sometimes negative,

Sometimes positive.

And it's just remarkable how real we believe it to be.

So,

Let's have a short meditation.

Just four or five minutes.

That's all we're going to do.

Just four or five minutes.

That's all we're going to do.

I just want to introduce this way of putting the racket down.

So,

Just sit quietly and close your eyes if you wish or rest your gaze on a blank wall or even look outside the window.

Take a couple of deep breaths.

That's it.

Now,

I want you to instance fall back,

So to speak,

And down into the body.

Down into the hara,

Which is below the belly or the lower belly.

Feel into there.

Now,

We're not trying to achieve anything here.

Okay.

You've already reached the destination,

Which is here,

Now,

Present.

We're going to look at what happens when mind pings over a ball or wants our attention.

So,

Just feel into the breath.

I shall go quiet for short periods to let you do this.

Now,

At some point,

You'll find yourself lost in thought.

You're ready to bat the ball back.

You're ready to get lost or you're already lost in that world of thought.

What I want you to do is in that world of thought.

What I want you to do is nothing.

Let it go.

Release.

And relax back into the body.

It's a kind of neutral response.

Back here.

Come back.

Don't give it your energy.

It's your energy.

It's your aliveness.

So,

Feel the breath.

That's it.

Again,

There'll be some point you may be able to watch your thought arise,

Appear and disappear.

Wonderful.

Often,

We just,

The attention just collapses into that world.

Notice that.

And when you do notice that you've been lost,

Just release.

And relax back into the body.

Take your energy back.

Don't feed it.

And back.

Resting here.

It is so simple.

We just have a habit of fixating on thought.

It's our main fixation.

Our primary addiction,

If you like,

Is to the thought.

Again and again,

We go there.

Feeding it.

Now,

When a practical thought arises,

That's fine.

You need to phone the doctors or you need to go to the grocery store or the supermarket.

Fine.

That's it.

We do it or not.

When we stop thinking about thinking so much,

We know a useful thought from one that's not.

There's an intuitive knowing.

So,

I just want to introduce this very simple.

You can call it meditation.

It's meditation in my experience of the way I was taught meditation.

It's not about trying to achieve something or to get somewhere.

It's about being here.

Looking at how I suffer psychologically.

That's what it's about.

How do I keep creating this?

Suffering in my life.

Because it's being created.

The moment you were lost in thought,

Then there's the possibility of psychological suffering.

There's infinite potential for suffering right when you get lost in that thought.

Because you're lost.

And in the world of thought,

Anything can happen.

So,

Just start taking the energy of the thought.

Anything can happen.

So,

Just start taking the energy back.

Not just in meditation but during the day.

And listen to one or two of my other audios on thoughts.

That's primarily what you need to be looking at for a while.

Just day after day.

Just okay.

Just come back to this one.

Listen to another one with a slightly different angle on it.

Okay.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Reviews

Helpful!

Thank you for sharing your teachings Surya. I find them useful and practical. I really liked the melon imagination exercise. It helps also to remind us that our body reacts to our thoughts and imagination. Bye bye 👋

Thank you so much for sharing this with the community. Always great to hear over and over again.
May I ask what type of meditation you practice? Shamata or Vipassana or…? Thank you so much 😊

Simply expressed and so accessible. Thank you Happy Buddha! Just what I needed.

Helpfully down to earth. Inspiring. And, no distracting music - 🙌

Thank you for sharing this talk. Shines a light on how easy it is to live our stories as if they’re true. It’s a skill to live in the moment , present, practice, practice. 🙏

Thank you. 🙏
You describe an elegant way of cutting off suffering at it's root by releasing the thought and relaxing back into the body... Release and Relax... my new mantra! 😄
Thank you... 🙏🪷🎾

Thank you, Suryacitta, for another really helpful one. Your teaching is just always right spot on. Learning how we participate in our suffering- that’s what it’s about. I can still taste that juicy melon😋🍈💕

you have helped me so much with my thinking, my thoughts. the average human brain has around 60,000 thoughts a day. that’s 40-45 per minute! and 80% of those are negative and 90% of those are repetitive!!! no wonder we think we’re losing our minds 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Thank you for this meaningful session, Suryacitta.
Guided to you at an appropriate time. 🙏💛🕊🌻