Control And Mindfulness

by Lawrence Van Rensburg

Control – probably all of us get a bit obsessed over it at some point in our lives.  The more of it we can get, the better our lives will be. At least, that is what we tell ourselves.

It is one of those “if only I could get this one thing then, life would start looking up” thoughts. There is always this “one thing” that is lacking, and control usually seems to fit the mould. In my own case, this was even true in my mindfulness practice. “One day I’ll be able to control my thoughts, and then life will be good.” This is how I perceived the goal that was awaiting me. But controlling my thoughts, I would slowly come to realize, is a bit of a tall order. The first glimpse of this came on my first ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, as taught by the great meditation master S.N. Goenka.

The experience commenced, as one might expect, with great excitement and even greater nervousness. There I was, just ten days away from taming my mind and gaining powerful control over it. Of course, I understood that I wouldn’t learn absolute control so quickly, but I had no doubt that I would finish the course at least halfway to my goal.

The first evening reinforced my desire to learn to control my mind. The sudden social seclusion and separation from all entertainment (no electronics, books or any other form of entertainment was allowed) left me feeling miserable. It took a few hours of staring at the ceiling and telling myself that one day I can just deny these depressing thoughts before I managed to fall asleep.

Meditation ensued. About ten hours in each day were set aside for this. In about half of these sessions, recordings of S.N. Goenka guided us through the techniques. Focus on the breath, “patiently and persistently”, he would instruct in the first few days before upgrading to a more intensive body-sweep routine, which encompasses every part of the body. Eventually, Goenka promised (despite warning us not to let this become the goal of the practice), the body will become engulfed in an amazing warm glow of energy – the feeling of all sensations combining into a cloud of borderless awareness – and vibration, signaling that the practice is working.

This is what I aimed for, then, although I tried reminding myself that I shouldn’t. The teacher advised, ‘Don’t aim, just be.’ This was hard to make sense of. This feeling I was meant to look out for was the signal that I was getting closer to being able to control my thoughts, yet I was meant to keep myself from trying to reach it. Why would I sit here for ten hours a day if I couldn’t aim for the goal?

It was only on day four when things started changing. Thoughts never started slowing down – in fact, more and more of them arose as I got more socially deprived – but I was starting to become more aware of when they were arising. The intensive focus on what I was experiencing right now in any moment, for hours on end, started putting my mind in the routine of doing so even outside of meditation. By day four, a walk in a garden wasn’t just a walk in the garden but a questioning of my own reasons for wanting to walk in the garden. Birds had always been interesting, but when I started seeing my thoughts about the qualities of the birds, I started becoming more interested in those thoughts than in the birds themselves. This is not because the thoughts were abnormally interesting in any way, but more that these thoughts had always been there – I just never noticed them before. It was the sudden realization of my past absent-mindedness that felt so interesting.

At this point I was starting to become more aware of the fleeting nature of thoughts. Thoughts spring up so fast and unexpectedly that one couldn’t predict them – much less create them. You can’t think a thought before you think it, as thinker and meditation master Sam Harris would say. And in the same breath, one couldn’t stop them. I wouldn’t have been able to piece this together at the time in such clarity, but I was starting to face the possibility that, perhaps, I could never learn to control my thoughts as I had planned this entire time.

This lesson was repeated endlessly over the course of the next six days. Thoughts arise without warning, take me in, and then die, over and over. Again though, it never occurred to me that control over them wasn’t an option. Surely I did have more control, because I was controlling my attention to move to the parts of my body I wanted it to move to. But are controlling attention and controlling thoughts the same thing?

In the first months after this experience I felt an unusual confidence in my presence with people. I felt immortal in some way, powerful and influential, almost as if people would listen to me without question. This carried with it a firmness in dealing with others – not just a certainty that I was right and others were wrong, but also a demand that they see it the same way. Those who didn’t were cast aside.

However, the more I practiced and observed my thoughts, the more I became aware of this tendency. The firmness and rigidity of Goenka’s routine may have created a frame to fit my entire life into, but the implicit requirement of the routine – turning attention inwards – slowly started making me aware of this frame, too; it was eating itself from the inside. The many layers of the onion were being peeled, and after another few months, what remained was the awareness of my treatment of other people. I was controlling. Demanding. I may have known this before, but I could never place it in any context that would make sense.

The context was always control: just as I’d wanted to control my thoughts, I’d wanted to control people. My mind had to fit into a snug box of my liking, and so did my friends. Whatever didn’t fit in the box – whether friend or thought – was discarded. Practice made me realize this, but it was the people themselves who made me realize that it was an impractical solution. Friends ought not to be controlled, and neither ought the thoughts. Both were more in themselves than just my desires merited, as they should be.

As I started becoming more aware of this disposition in my relationships, I started thinking more about this desire for control and paying more attention to it in my practice. Why did I want to control people so? What feeling drove me to it? Was it a feeling in the chest, in the belly, in the head? Where did the thoughts come from that compelled me to argue with someone when they did something I didn’t want them to do? What satisfaction does control give me, anyway? The feeling of being right? Where did the thoughts go once they have run their course? As I continued my practice, I started seeing these thoughts and sensations more clearly even during conversation. This means I could see how quickly the desire to control arose, and how quickly they faded. And, importantly, this desire was always tied to some thought about “who” I was or ought to be. Impermanence, then, was implicit in the ego-driven desire to control. At that point I knew I had to relinquish control and just let them be who they wanted to be.

This realization counted for controlling my thoughts as well as other people – the impermanence of the desire to control being apparent in both cases – and I discovered that even when I did manage to bend things to my will, it wasn’t as satisfying as I’d expected. But more importantly, I discovered that both are of a quality that cannot be controlled. Thoughts will unexpectedly arise in the mind of both the beginner and the master – even negative ones. We don’t decide what thoughts to create when they arise, just as we don’t decide to become aware of the smell of tea when it is brewed – it just imposes itself onto our awareness.

And since we don’t create them, controlling them is impossible. They do not arise by my permission, but by their own power. The mind is vast – limitless perhaps – with no executive deciding what passes and what doesn’t. Conscious awareness is not the creator of any thought, but the ending of them all – becoming aware only takes place after the fact. Of course, after becoming aware of a thought, one can revise the direction of our attention, but this is not quite “controlling” the thoughts themselves.

Once this became clear to me, it started getting much easier to relinquish my desire to control. I could let others be themselves – imperfect, just like me – and laugh about it along with them. And I could start being softer on myself. Life doesn’t have to be so serious, I started reminding myself, and this counted for meditation practice, too. It doesn’t have to be this rigid, militant routine to try and manipulate my mind to be how I want it to be. Instead, I could take a step back from trying to be the executive and just allow the mind to do what it does best, by itself, while I enjoy the show in a relaxed state of choiceless awareness.