Thinking cannot meditate.
Do you sit to meditate, follow the technique, and still find you can’t stop thinking?
There is a reason for that. Any technique to meditate is a thinking process, and thinking cannot meditate.
Thinking is not natural
Natural meditation, as the word itself suggests, is connected to the nature of the human organism that you are. What is natural to you is what you were born with. What denaturalises the human species is the information, education and conditioning that has been added to you after you’re born.
Thinking is part of what has been added. It’s a big jump to understand that, because we are able to feel naturally and sense naturally. All of our sense organs operate naturally, without any interference of a thinking process, and they operate in their optimal and perfect way.
Early in our life we are shown how to think, because we don’t know how to think when we’re born. That is useful, of course. We need thinking. But thinking itself is not natural to the human being, and it has become a major problem, because we use it for so many things it simply isn’t useful for. One of the biggest is the understanding of our own nature. Self-understanding is beyond thinking. Thinking is only for describing what we already understand.
When you’re hungry, you feel the hunger, and in that immediate sensation you know hunger. Then you create the words and the thoughts to express it. Those words are not an understanding of hunger. They merely repeat what the body already understands. The body knows. Thinking reports.
Think of someone close to you, your son, your daughter, your wife, your friend, your mother. You could try to tell me all about that person, and you would need a hundred years. Yet you know that person intimately. You know them by holding the feeling of them in your body, and in a moment you feel the whole knowing of them. That knowing cannot be expressed verbally, but it can be known at a felt level in the instant you bring them to your attention. It is a small example of the capacity of the body to know, and it is far superior to the thought process.
A technique is thinking
Any technique to meditate is a thinking process, and a thinking process is merely a repeated process. That is a form of self-hypnosis: through the repetition of a particular technique, you arrive at an experience that is derived from that repetition. This is an outside in approach to meditation. It’s not really meditation at all, even though it is what meditation has come to on a public level.
It has been accepted on a public level because no one knows any better. Even the people who guide meditation techniques based on thinking, noises, sounds, chants and mantras don’t understand that.
You cannot think your way into meditation. You cannot chant your way into meditation. You cannot image your way into meditation. Each of these is still thinking, and each is an application of thought to bring about a certain condition or a certain feeling. The problem with all of them is that we are trying to change the way we naturally are.
You cannot improve on how you are
A technique is goal orientated. It’s desire based and thought based, built on a certain idea or belief system. When you want to achieve something or change something in the way you experience yourself, whilst you are pursuing that goal, you are thinking.
So the trick to thinking dropping away is to have no aim: no goal to achieve anything, and no goal to be any different to the way you are.
Meditation is to understand yourself, and the only way you can understand yourself is as you are, not as you want to be. As you want to be causes suppression, denial, avoidance and overriding of yourself as you actually are. What you end up with is not real. It’s a manufactured state, a hypnotised state born of conditioning and the repetition of other people’s thoughts.
To think you must improve on the way you are is an affront to the way you are. It’s an attack on yourself, and it is not how you are ever going to change yourself.
What natural meditation is
Natural meditation is what is already happening in you naturally, without you doing a thing, without you thinking a thing, without you applying a thing.
Sit physically still. Do not concern yourself with what you are thinking, and just let that go on. It’s your concern with what you’re thinking that keeps you thinking. The less you worry about, think about or dissect it, the less you are thinking.
Don’t try to stop your thinking. You can’t stop something that isn’t really happening. Thought is an imagining, and the more you try to stop it, the more you imagine it and keep that imagining going. In time you’ll come to understand that thought is not really there.
Then come back to the body. Every sensation of your seeing, your hearing, your smell, your taste and the touch of your skin is happening naturally, and thought has nothing to do with it. The primary point of experiencing sound is a vibration in your ears. The primary point of experiencing touch is the touch itself. Start there, and feel however you are throughout your body, without trying to change it.
You are already in that experience. You only need to sit very still for a little while until it becomes more apparent. You will find you were disconnected from it, thinking, trying to achieve something and trying to improve something.
The body is the only thing that can be present
Thought is a memory. A goal is something you are looking for in the future. The thought process can never be present, it is always in the past or about the past. The sensory state of the body is the only thing that can be present.
Sitting still and feeling what is already there, without a technique, is what my meditation app, Undo, will guide you in doing for yourself.
About the author
Matthew Zoltan
Matthew Zoltan pioneered mind-body connection therapy in Australia in the late 1980s and is the creator of Natural Meditation. 39 years of direct work with the body. Founder of Quiet Retreats. Co-founder of the Undo app.