Build Your Self First Before You Argue With It

If you a reader of mine, you’ve heard me say that “not all craving control strategies are created equal.”  I still stand by that.  But here’s  a related thought.  The less potent strategies (such as self-talk) can be leveraged in utility as your sense of self crystallizes in time.

Here’s what I mean.  Some of us have not yet developed a particularly firm sense of self: the self-structure is a little fuzzy so to say, not enough informational-conceptual ego.   If you are getting easily flooded with emotions, if you happen to recognize yourself in the Borderline Personality Disorder diagnostic criteria, such craving control strategies as self-talk are a bit premature.  To put it bluntly, you just don’t have a firm enough self to argue with yourself (because that’s what self-talk is, a kind of inner dialogue, a tug-of-war between the wise mind and the not-so-wise mind).  Self-talk is a bit too destabilizing, defragmenting for a self that is not neurotic enough to argue with itself.

If you are recognizing yourself in this, then mindfulness-based craving control is a better option.  Mindfulness-based craving control allows you to build the very self that is required for self-talk.  Say, you are craving ice-cream.  Instead of arguing with yourself, you simply notice the sensation and just as you notice the sensation, you inadvertently notice yourself noticing it.  This is the process of differentiation, or identity-building, or structure-building.  When you notice yourself being separate from your emotions (and craving is just a state of desire), you are actually actively engaging in the process of self-construction.  You are building a firmer, more conceptual sense of self.  

With this in mind, mindfulness-based craving control is a form of self-work, a process that firms up your sense of self.  So, by witnessing a craving come and go, you are also getting to see the self that triumphantly remains intact.  As this sense of self firms up in time, self-talk craving control strategies become a plausible option.  But not until…

In sum: self is a prerequisite for self-talk craving control.  So, build your (neurotic) self (ego) first before you start arguing with it or try to transcend it.

Resources:

Mindful Eating Tracker

Craving Control Training

Medium-Depth Thought by Pashka the Handless

Peter Fenner says:  “bring [yourself] into contact with the raw sensory information of [your] experience."

Well put, Pete.

Here's the same idea not so well put as I second this movement towards subject-object nonduality:

"Mind is the bureaucrat of consciousness: it stands in the way of its own experience, wanting to conceptually sign off on the receipt of the experience before it has had the chance to have it."

A deep thougth by Jack Handy?  I hope not: I was hoping for some shallowness.  Heck, I'd settle for a thought of medium depth...

Recursiveness (that you can see in my expression) is a sign of a stream eddying-editing up the wrong way, the sign of a mind trying to trace its flow-steps back to the source of its own flow...

Can't be done, but trying to do it is part of meta-cognitive self-awareness.  Helps to know this river of consciousness has a point of origin...

Mind can never get a handle on consciousness.

 Just another, hopefully, medium-depth thought by Pashka the Handless... 

Keeping Cool When Mind is On Fire

There's thinking... and there's thinking about thinking as a stream of thoughts...

Think about it...

Here goes a thought... Here goes another... And so it goes... On and on and on...

Consciousness has been compared to a river: like a river, mind flows, from one thought to another, incessantly, irrevocably...

Here's one of the thoughts that Buddhism built its psychological salvation on: "there has never been a thought that didn't go away."

Hmm...

No need to try to not think about what I don't want to think about! No need to resist the thoughts that I am already having! No need to push the thoughts I don't like out! No need to do anything but stay and watch the thoughts go... After all, if it's true that there's never been a thought that didn't go away, why do the river's work? The river knows how to flow...

Wow...

"There's never been a thought that didn't go away..."

What if... what if I let go of every thought except this one? What if all I thought was "there's never been a thought that didn't go away?" What would that be like?!

So, here I'd sit, on the bank of this babbling brook of consciousness, watching thoughts pass, thinking "there's never been a thought that didn't go away." What would that be like?!

Swami Vivekananda, in writing about Dattatreya, the author of Advahuta Gita, a Vedanta text on Nonduality, wrote: "Men like the one who wrote this Song <...> they care for nothing, they feel nothing done to the body, care not for heat, cold, danger, or anything. They sit still <...> and though red-hot coals burn the body, they feel them not." (1)

Such people are sometimes called "non-returners" - having left the stream of consciousness, having found a place in the shade of the meta-cognitive distance, on the bank of this babbling brook of consciousness, they never re-enter the river of the experience. They think of thoughts as thoughts, and, thus, remain un-touched by the never-ceasing evanescence of their mind-states...

Is that possible?

Journalist Malcolm Brown witnessed one such "non-returner" in 1963 when a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc performed an act of self-immolation. The man sat down, poured gasoline over himself and lit himself up. What's amazing - to me - is not the cause, not even the decision, but what happened after... Nothing happened: the man sat, in a lotus position, while burning alive. The skin of his face coagulating in flames... Dying... Burning alive...

Thich - a real, historically-documented non-returner... He didn't return because he never left the place of his here-and-now presence.... even with a river of pain-lava flowing through his mind...

How's that possible?

It is.

Imagine you had a chance to ask Thich this very question: "How is this possible? How are you able to just sit while you are on fire?"

My guess, Thich would've asked in return: "What fire?"

"There's never been a thought that didn't go away..."

In this myriad of fleeting thoughts, perhaps, this one is the only one worth holding?

Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time"(New Harbinger, 2008)

www.eatingthemoment.com