Get Out Of Your Mind

“Be empty.  Think of who created thought!  Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”

Rumi

“We should take care not to make the intellect our God.”

Albert Einstein

I would have told you that I loved thinking, not so very long ago.  It was something that excited and interested me, stimulated my mind, and gave me an adrenalin rush - so I wasn’t any too keen on giving it up.  The idea of being empty used to scare the shit out of me.  What would I do with all that space in my head?  What thoughts would I have if I wasn’t the one choosing what to think?  Would I become bland and boring, without a single idea of my own?  And how would I figure anything out if I didn’t think about and analyse things?  What was the purpose of my mind if I didn’t use it?  How would I fill the time that was taken up with it?

And then came the very, very, very gradual realisation that it’s not that I love it so much (at least, not all of it), but rather that I am addicted to the rush, and that it serves as a distraction from what I am meant to be doing.  I could spend whole days just sitting (or wandering around aimlessly), lost in my own inner world, avoiding doing anything in this one: it’s easier than having to force myself to have to focus, and practice discipline and self-control.  And besides, I don’t always care too much for this reality, so drifting off into another world is just another way of escaping. 

With the rush, though, comes the over-stimulation, and with that comes the inevitable crash: thinking wipes me out, physically as well as mentally.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that I am left in a state of such tiredness that I am able to go to sleep for hours on end to recoup: that would be too convenient.  Instead I find myself catapulted into a state of something that almost resembles suspended animation – my body and mind have slowed down so much that I can barely think or function, and yet my whole being is thrumming with an overabundance of nervous energy that makes it impossible for any part of me to be still.  It’s a bugger.

I had also started to recognise a while ago that my thoughts are actually rather repetitive – obsessive I think is the word (God forbid that I should be called obsessive!).  So much so that even I was remembering having had them before (and sharing them with my long-suffering friend), on an all-too-regular basis.  My mind has learned the very neat trick of being able to take the same thoughts and repackage them, so that I never quite recognise that I’m just replaying the same stuff: I’ve had more repeats than you get on television.  Rather than being the free-thinking intellectual I thought I was, it turns out that I am often extremely boring, and my thoughts can be terribly tedious.  I’m bored with them, so they must be bad ‘cos I usually think they’re so riveting, and important, that everyone wants to hear them. Again.  And again.  And again.  And again...

The other, major problem with my thinking is that when it gets going I am controlled by it: I just don’t seem to know when, or how, to stop; and even attempting to slow it down is almost impossible.  And as to imagining that I can control the kind of thoughts I have – it’s a delusion.  It’s as if I am not really choosing them at all: not consciously, anyway.  It’s like plugging into a television set, where all the controls are stuck so you cannot switch it off, change channels, or adjust the volume – I am simply bombarded by the myriad of random images and sounds being projected at me, and it feels like I’m being pinned to the sofa, unable to move, a passenger in my own life.  And anyone unfortunate enough to be around when it’s happening invariably gets steamrollered by my verbiage.

But even when I do get a truly inspirational idea, one that doesn’t originate within the narrow confines of my maze of a mind, but which comes to me from my higher Self (God, as I like to call it, though some people get bent out of shape about the word), there still remains the problem of what I do with it – namely, sit and admire it from every conceivable angle, talk about it at depth, and bask in the glow of wonderment that I’ve finally seen the light (again).  And the moment I do all of that, in order to attempt to control, understand, and keep hold of it, I move into obsession, and off we go again.  Different thoughts, same behaviour.

I have pondered the question, long and hard, of how to deal with this obsessional thinking.  It especially confounded me when I discovered that I am autistic, and that being obsessive is a common trait.  Did this mean, then, that I was condemned to have to live with this constant stream, never having any respite from it?  Was I going to be at the mercy of my ever-cogitating mind?  If that was the case, was it possible for me to choose to be obsessed only with positive things, and to channel that into constructive pursuits?  This appeared to me to be what people like Temple Grandin have done, and she has only two major obsessions, as far as I’m aware.  Was this the answer?

Er, no - to put it bluntly.  Perhaps for some autistics it works, but it hasn’t been a great success for me.  Of course, I have no idea whether Temple Grandin is still plagued by random obsessive thinking, in amongst her consuming focus on her special interests.  All I know is that trying to only be obsessed with my special interests, to keep at bay all that uninvited, negative crap that enters my head at random and then refuses to leave, doesn’t work for me. 

For one thing, I have more than just two particular interests – yoga, writing, art, craft, Sanskrit, calligraphy, reading, and dancing.  Which means that deciding to be obsessed with one of them (writing, for example) simply results in my being distracted from doing the others.  I end up with my head full of story titles and bits of poetry, all demanding to be taken notice of and written down – except that it happens at the most inopportune moments (in the middle of yoga, for example), which means that I can’t do anything with them because that would mean abandoning my plan.  Of course, the minute I get to my writing time the whole bloody lot has disappeared, or I’ve lost interest because they’ve been replayed in my head so many times that it feels like I’m just rehashing an old tale.  And there’s nothing more boring than having to write up a twice-told tale.  Especially when you’ve heard it being retold in your head a lot more than just twice! 

Or, I just can’t make a decision as to which one to go with first because my head has been flooded with too many ideas all at once.  Plus, not only has my enthusiasm for writing been spent, but I’ve also in the process lost interest in everything else that I haven’t been able to focus on doing during the day because I’ve been lost in my head.  And part of the purpose of my weekly plan is to help me practice disciplining my mind to focus on what I’m doing.

So, once I’ve worn myself out with my initial over-enthusiastic ruminations, and got bored with them, my mind is happily primed and ready to assail me with any thought, positive or negative, that happens to be lying around: after all, one obsessive thought is no different to another – as I have found to my cost.  Yep, I’ve basically opened the door and invited them in.

I have realised that I’m probably never not going to think in an obsessive way, when I do think.  I cannot help but move from one theme to the next, in a rigid manner, and to have a relatively limited set of topics at any one time, which I have a tendency to return to regularly.  Spontaneity is not my thing, no matter how much I might wish to be, or try to be – my brain just isn’t designed to be able to accommodate this particular trait, and it’s pointless railing against it.  

But what I’m discovering about myself is that this doesn’t have to mean that I can never enjoy moments of peace; nor learn to be able to focus my mind on what I am doing; or acquire the ability to slow down my mind and ignore my thoughts, and not be at the mercy of it and them.  Can you imagine having peace in your head, and not being overwhelmed and controlled by the constant stream of noise raining down on you, like being in the midst of a bomb attack?  Well, I’ve found a way.  The irony is that I’ve been doing it for nearly ten years but completely missed the point, until now.  And it’s all in the breath.