Chapter eight

How to switch off unwanted thoughts

Nearly every problem in the world today can be traced back to one cause. That is the excessive thinking of an individual and the failure to switch off the thoughts. The three groups of defilement - greed, anger and delusion - that all Buddhists know well cannot happen on their own. They can only come with a transporter and that is thought.

The owner of the thought which carries greed who fails to stop it will certainly respond to his or her greedy thought, which depends on what and how much he or she craves. People who have less greed will grab less whilst those who have more greed will naturally grab more. Mahatama Gandhi said that the natural resources in the world are enough to feed every single human on earth but they are not enough to satisfy just one greedy person. We only need to look around and we know that Gandhi was quite right. Poverty in the world is certainly man-made. This world has only a few wealthy people who can engineer the destiny of so many things and events as well as their own wealth. As for thought which carries anger and hatred with it, we all know what such destructive thought is capable of and can lead to. When people cannot switch off their angry thoughts, they subsequently cannot stop their boiling angry feeling.[1] The owner of that angry thought will be forced to respond and react to whatever his or her thought tells him or her to do. A much lesser degree is merely a touch of resentment in the owner’s heart, which develops into arguments between two persons, to being violent towards other person, to committing different levels of crime leading finally to the extreme degree of causing a war. The greedy thought and the angry thought are related by nature in that if we cannot have what we want or crave for, we get angry. However, both greedy and angry thoughts are overruled by delusion. Delusive thought, as it is described, does not have a distinctive nature like greed and anger. Nonetheless, delusion reflects itself in the following thoughts and feelings e.g. embarrassment, uncertainty, doubt, insecurity, discontentment, boredom and fear. Among those feelings, fear is the worst of all e.g. fear of ghosts, poverty, being laughed at, ageing, illness, death, etc.

We all know as well that if we do not think about our problems, we won’t have problems. The trouble is we cannot switch our thoughts off and therefore we cannot solve our problems. The persistent thought itself becomes the problem in which we are trapped and which forms a vicious circle. As a result, people seek their way out in all sorts of ways so that they can stop thinking about their problems. If the problem is not a major one, people can go out, enjoy themselves and soon forget about the problem. If the problem is serious, people need to take some stronger measure to stop thinking about their problems and the most popular solution is anti-depressant drugs, although a great number in our modern society choose to take illegal drugs. Eating disorders and heavy drinking are also alternative ways that many people choose so that they can stop thinking. If all those measures fail to work, many people have no choice but use the ultimate solution, suicide. There is no doubt that depression is one of the most common illnesses of our modern society. This serious mental condition which hits one in four Britons, costs Britain more than 8 billion pounds a year in health care, loss of productivity and social security benefit. The World Health organisation predicts that in 20 years’ time depression will be the second most burdensome illness in the world.[2]

Every day, we hear the phrase “don’t think about it”. We are either the one who dishes out the precious advice or we take the advice ourselves. We all know that it is easier said than done especially if we are on the side of taking the advice. None of us want to keep our painful, unpleasant and disturbing thoughts. When we are face to face with the bombarding thoughts shooting at us like machine guns, we are all powerless. This is the condition that the Buddha compared to dust being trapped in a cart’s wheel. To free ourselves from that vicious circle is the most difficult task on earth. Without the help of the Buddha, we are all still being trapped in the cart’s wheel for as long as it takes. However, the sad truth is that the majority of people in the world still do not know that there is indeed a way out of that vicious circle. This is the main reason for all these words.

Temple-goers nowadays are being looked at as those who have personal problems and that’s why they need to seek help from monks. Very few people can link their mental illness (due to being unable to stop the unwanted thoughts) to the enlightenment of the Buddha. As a matter of fact, the enlightenment of the Buddha can directly help us to cure this most fundamental problem; that is to be able to stop thinking when we want to. To see the state of Nirvana or ultimate truth is a direct matter of finding stability for the mind and indeed about dealing with thoughts. The four foundations of awareness or vipassana-bhavana is the exact practice of creating a new mental habit. That is the habit of switching off unwanted or rubbish thoughts, at the same time generating useful and creative thoughts. This is exactly the mental habit that people do not have and is the root cause of all problems in the world today. People do not realise that letting our minds drift away with thoughts, imagination, fantasy and dreams is a bad mental habit which needs to be corrected. People may ask, what is wrong with having fantasies, dreams and imagination? Let’s not mention the positive dreams, fantasy and imagination which can brighten the world up but look closely at the negative ones. I am sure that at least once in our lives, we all have had some weird (waking) dream, fantasy or imagination. In fact, once in our lives is an extreme understatement just in case someone might say I have never had one, because a great number of people are literally living in their dream, fantasy and imagination all the time. The next thing is the degree of weirdness which adds to the shocking result. I am sure readers begin to get the picture of crimes relating to bizarre fantasy. Paedophile and serial killers are the obvious examples of people who cannot stop thinking about their weird fantasy. As for the two teenagers who have just gunned down 15 youngsters in a high school including themselves: this was also the result of being unable to stop their hate-filled thoughts, plus a few other factors which made the massacre become possible. One main factor is Hollywood which helped to build the fantasy of killing people they hated just like their stars did in the films they idolised. Another main factor is that guns are available items in America. If those two boys were in Britain, that chilling incident might not have happened because they would not have been able to get hold of guns so easily. Another crucial factor to make this crime so horrendous is the Internet. I don’t know whether I should use the term fortunate or unfortunate that our modern society has such a high technology as the Internet which was meant to unite humanity. Now, we can see the very dark side of this technology. Without the Internet, the two boys would not have had the easiest access to the resources of how to make bombs. However, we must understand that Hollywood, the gun law in the US and the Internet are only subsequent factors which make the weird fantasy become possible. The root of this problem still comes back to the failure to switch off weird and destructive thoughts. This is how dangerous this bad mental habit can be. The suffering of people in the world today is the sheer result of all our bad mental habits which we not only inflict upon ourselves but also on others. The trouble is we don’t need that many people to exercise their destructive fantasy to cause mayhem. The heart-wrenching plight of the Bosnian refugees right now is caused by just one person. During the past fifty years, five key persons were responsible for the tragic death of approximately 50 million innocent people or more. We must not take this bad mental habit too lightly.

The bad mental habit (drifting away with thoughts and fantasy) is not something that people can easily detect and put right by themselves. We even know that biting finger nails is a bad physical habit and it is difficult to change even though we can see what is happening. What chance do we have to change our mental habits which are something we cannot see. In the end, we must admit that we need help. The arrival of all great teachers in the past, the Buddha and Christ for example, was meant for this very purpose, but we cannot understand those holy words well enough to gain the benefit from them and turn to other forms of refuge instead. This is a great shame!

I am doing my best to make things simpler for people. To get right to the point, the four foundations of awareness are about correcting our mental habits until we can truly find our real mental freedom. People who have never heard of the four foundations of awareness should quickly find experts and learn from them.

[1] While I am writing this article, the American people are trying to come to terms once again with the massacre at a High School in Corolado which left 15 people dead and many more injured. This bloodbath was the sixth such event spreading over the past 18 months in America.