Catching a Thought

Back in 2007, when I had been on the spiritual path for a few years, I would listen to teachers talking about how we are not our thoughts. They would describe how thoughts were just appearing in this empty, open space of What We Truly Are, but I didn’t really get it. To me, my thoughts appeared to be a continuous stream of commentary that not only told me who I was, but were who I was.

Then one morning, as I was walking down the hallway at Baylor University where I taught yoga, I suddenly got what these teachers had been talking about.

A thought—I don’t even remember what it was about—appeared and I saw its “individual essence,” so to speak, how it was distinct from other thoughts. It was as if I’d reached out and caught it, like a wiggling fish in my hand that had seemed so elusive when swimming rapidly with all the other fish.

And now that it was separated out from the rest of the school of thought-fish and consciously held in the hand of my attention, I was able to examine it more closely. What was it, really? I wasn’t sure, but what I did see was that, because I was puzzling over it, it couldn’t be “me” as I understood myself to be at the time—the content of my thoughts.

I couldn’t yet see that the puzzling over the thought itself was actually another little thought-fish that I could catch in the same manner. Nor could I see that I was really the space in which all these thoughts were appearing and disappearing. However, I had finally gotten some traction in my spiritual search and it was the beginning, at least, of being able to explore more deeply into the nature of What I Truly Am.

A lifetime of being conditioned to following thoughts can be a difficult thing to overcome, though, and it would be few more years before I had another significant revelation, which you can read about in my next post—Trying to Get to My True Self.