SuperBuddha for the Over Thinking Mind

I don’t know about you, but I think too much. Way too much. I am always stuck someplace in my head. Sometimes when I am at work or having a conversation I am actually driving my car alone or doing dishes. I notice that I get transported by my thinking. I get so caught up and tangled within the pentetrailias of my brain, that I experience out-of-body sensations when I think too much. For example, I will notice when I am walking that I have been thinking so much that I was totally unaware of what street I was on or how I got to the location where I was now standing. When doing dishes it is a common occurrence that I break dishes because I am off some place in the past or future instead of being present at the kitchen sink. I will spend my days lost in thought. I look like I am going through the daily motions but really I am caught up in the transitory and fragmented sentences and images that are continually looping around in my brain. Hamsters on a hamster wheel and myself have a lot more in common than I would like to admit.

Sometimes I will sit by the side of a highway and watch the cars race by. Mental tin cans with bobbing heads inside. But they are not just bobbing heads. Each of these persons passing by at high speeds are unique human beings (even the ones flying American flags from their American made vehicles) who are dearly loved by someone. As each of these persons races by in their vehicles I can not help but wonder how many of them are actually aware at that moment that they are driving in a metal vehicle at high speeds. I would bet that most of these loved human beings are lost in some thought, somewhere. Their instincts or learned habitual behavior is what is driving the car, while they are reliving some conversation, obsessing over some thing that they have to get done in the future or something wrong they did in the past or just having dozens of thoughts that end nowhere, go nowhere and mean nothing more than an obsessive thought pattern that the person has been stuck in since childhood. As I sit and watch the cars race by, I notice that I have a slight shiver of fright when I think that all these people may be totally unaware of the fact that they are driving a car.

I think this could be true for most Americans these days. Whether it is driving a car, doing dishes, working out, hanging Christmas lights, taking a shower or doing any number of activities- most Americans are not aware of what they are doing in the moment. They are caught up in some kind of thought process instead. How could this not be true? We live in a culture that fills our social, physical and psychological airwaves with a continual stream of fragmented messages- thoughts. We are completely submerged in a sea of over thinking brought to us by CBS, ABC, Time Warner or any one of the multitudinous amounts of media and/or corporate agencies all competing for our thoughts. There are as many thoughts floating around us as there are atoms. The troubling thing is that thoughts are smaller than atoms and cannot be seen by the naked eye. They cannot even be witnessed under the most high-powered microscopes created by human kind. In fact thoughts cannot be seen at all and this is what makes them so fucking powerful. My guess is that if you were indeed suddenly able to perceive thoughts you would notice that you were sitting in the middle of a fishbowl filled with them. Like water, there are thoughts everywhere. We are swimming in them.

So it is no surprise that most people are completely disembodied (including myself at times). What I mean by disembodied is that the person is so stuck in their thoughts that they are not aware of what their body is doing. They are as unaware of the feeling of their feet on the ground as they are the massive amount of thoughts following them around. Instead they are like heads without bodies, spending the majority of their time lost somewhere above the neck. So is it any wonder why there are so many broken dishes, so many car accidents, so many dysfunctional relationships, so much violence and so many wayward souls? We are all thinking way too much. At least I know I am.

So what does Buddhism have to do with any of this? I am not sure yet. I know that the practice of Buddhism can be summed up in one sentence: do not cling to any notion of “I” or “mine.” When we think too much we are caught in the web of “I” and “mine” and Buddhism becomes like a superhero that can swoop down and free us from the tangled web of too much thinking. I have read numerous Buddhist texts. I have gone to retreats, I have spent hours in meditation- all in the hopes of putting some space between my itinerant thoughts and myself. But for all the work that I have done, for all the “Buddhistic” proselytizing that I have engaged in, SuperBuddha is yet to set me free. I still break dishes. I still scare myself with fatalistic obsessive thinking. I still think one thing and say another and then say one thing and think another. I am still as emerged in my thinking as any driver on an American highway.

Never have Americans needed a superhero more than they need a Superbuddha. We are all so assaulted by thoughts that it threatens are very survival. We have been literally consumed alive by thoughts to the point where we are no longer able to distinguish between what thought is authentically ours and what thought is invading from some outside source. As a culture we have been hit hard by the parasitical army of too much thinking and I am not sure that even a SuperBuddha would be capable of setting us free from malevolent web of over thinking. But I am trying to listen to my wife and be somewhat of an optimist. May all these Buddhist books that I have lying around my house can help. Maybe my meditation cushion, which is collecting dust, can be a powerful weapon against the mental flooding that continually seems to suck me under. I will not give up just yet. At least I don’t think so.

Don’t Fit Me Inside That Box!

It seems like there are boxes all around. They are not your average cardboard box. No these boxes are tall, large and can fit thousands of people in them. These boxes can not be seen from the outside. They can only be felt and identified when having a conversation with a person who is in one. The older I get the more that I realize that America is a country made out of boxes. But the thing about American boxes is that everyone is in denial that they are there. The majority are squeezed into one box or another and when confronted about these they demand that you come into the box with them or else you are derided, scorned and pushed outside. Americans love their boxes. They feel safe, purposeful and important inside. Greed and profit build these boxes. Anderson Cooper, Fox News and every other corporate entity builds these boxes. Fear builds these boxes. They build these boxes out of an intellectual rational, a logic and/or a philosophy that really means nothing outside of the box. Like prisoners who learn to love their jailers, Americans love their narrow-minded boxes.

I have been trying for so long to stay out of these boxes but man has got to eat and in America it is difficult to make money without choosing a box to squeeze within. In my effort to find an honest professions I have tried to comfortably fit myself into several different kinds of boxes but I have not been able to remain in them long. I start to have difficulty breathing and feel as if my soul is being diminished. So I make my way out of the box (which is not often a pleasurable experience because those who remain in the boxes are envious of your escape and will do what they can to block the doorway) and once I am out in fresh air my breathing is able to return to some semblance of normalcy. My soul begins to regrow and I feel relieved of all the angst that I felt when I was trapped inside the box. But then after a few days of living outside of the box a worry begins to grow in my mind. “What am I going to do with my life?” “How am I going to make money?” “How will I be able to have some kind of cultural legitimacy without a box to fit in?” All these questions and more get stronger day after day of living outside of the box and eventually I find myself checking out new boxes and investigating if there is room for me to move inside. The cycle is like that mythological snake that seems to continually be eating its own tail- such is American life.

A year ago I found my way into an academic box. I returned to graduate school (for the third time) in order to become a psychotherapist. What I did not take into consideration was that while in the academic box I was going to have to make a very tight squeeze into an even smaller, more rigidified box, which is the professional box. With all of my physical and mental muscle I am trying to keep one foot in the box and one outside of the box but this can be exhausting when existing halfway in a box that feels as if it demands total conformity. Currently I want to burn the box down but this is the genius aspect of institutionalized and organizational boxes. You can burn down these boxes but what happens in the end is that new boxes are immediately erected, the majority of people step back inside of them even more loyal to their boxes than before and you (the one who burned the box down) are no longer allowed inside and are left with a huge debt to pay. American boxes are self perpetuating systems that have mastered the art of abolishing authentic dissent.

When I go outside of my home all I see are boxes. I see people traveling in cars (which are a kind of box) from one box into another. American life is lived inside of boxes. Some boxes are certainly nicer and more spacious than others but still it is just a box. Now that I am 40 years of age and not wanting to live the rest of my life impoverished and outside in the cold I am finding that my instinctual will to remain outside of any box is weakening. I am tolerating more criticism and negative energy from those who live in boxes when I remind them of the box they are in. I am beginning to put up with having less room to breathe in. As much as I am moving deeper and deeper into the box I refuse to stop pointing out the box that we are all standing in. I refuse to be quiet while blind obedience actually believes that its shit does not stink. This may make my life more difficult. It may land me on a sidewalk or in some blind alley living under an actual cardboard box. But I tell myself that the good thing about these cardboard boxes that homeless individuals live in is that people can actually see and acknowledge that they are there. These cardboard boxes are some of the last authentic objects left in America.