Untrain Your Parrot (eBook)

From Chapter 10: Fingers Pointing at the Moon: Mindful Activity Labeling

Thought Echoing: Directly Untraining Our Parrot

If we're not trying to retrain our parrot, our conditioned mind, what helps the untraining, or unconditioning, process occur most naturally? Poetry and folk wisdom stress the value of seeing ourselves as others see us. Now that open awareness has helped activate the observer, and some exposure to the physical dimension has enlivened the experiencer, the condition makes more embodied objective awareness available. Now it's time to listen carefully to what our parrot is already saying. This may sound unnecessary, since we're thinking and talking all the time, but how often are we really listening?

One way to begin to attend more carefully to what the mind is up to, before it moves into speech, is thought echoing, which helps us discover the content of our minds by actively mirroring back thoughts precisely. This is done primarily during formal meditation.

Thought echoing starts as soon as we notice that thinking has taken over.We listen to what we are thinking and echo it back verbatim, the way a trained parrot repeats a phrase in rote fashion, preceded by the word 'thinking': if the thought is 'Won't thought echoing make me think more?' the echo would be 'Thinking 'Won't thought echoing make me think more?''

When I first started using thought echoing, I was sure that the speed of my thinking had doubled. Actually, the echoing was only mirroring back the deluge of thoughts that used to pass unnoticed. Far from increasing the volume of thoughts, echoing slows the rate by setting up a temporary roadblock in the oncoming thought traffic.

Thought echoing has the added value of providing snapshots of the mind's specific content. This in turn discloses, over time, whether our thinking is primarily functional and life-serving, or self-serving, by providing a specific script of our ego structure. Ego is always specific, someone once asked pioneering nutritionist Adele Davis whether apricots were good for you, and she said, 'Which apricot, where?' Which ego, where? The thoughts will tell.

Thought echoing not only keeps the notion of an ego from becoming vaguely generic, it also pinpoints the mind's inconsistencies. It's common to hold, and believe equally, two opposing thoughts: 'I must do whatever is suggested to me,' and 'I absolutely must not do anything that is suggested to me.' Stereo dissonance like this ties us in mental and physical knots. We may be discomfited to find some bottom feeders—,truly unpleasant thoughts about ourselves and others, thoughts whose presence we might have been able to deny before thought echoing brought them to light. After thought echoing has become a stable ability, we can start to employ thought labeling, by category: conversing, daydreaming, reminiscing, planning, and rehashing. Unlike thought echoing, thought labeling requires additional thinking, so we should wait until we've become familiar with our general thought patterns before trying thought labeling. After the content and patterns of our thinking are quite well known to us, it's sometimes enough to say 'thinking' silently, as a form of thought awareness. Still, both thought echoing and thought labeling may need to be in our repertoire for quite a while.

As thoughts become more transparent, it's fun to play with other forms of thought awareness. For example, when upsets come along,we can ask, 'What's my most believed thought about this?' A follow-up question might be 'What would I like to have said?' Or, 'What disturbs me most about this situation?'...