“Thought is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.”

I first heard that quote about 50 years ago, when I first started exploring meditation. (Yes, I was a pretty weird 15 year old, something my siblings reminded me of constantly!) I liked the quote’s pithiness and the insight it contained. After all, I had already struggled mightily with intrusive, ruminative thoughts as I sat cross-legged trying to follow my breath. It was quickly becoming clear to me that thought was definitely not my servant.

At the same time, there were moments – when I wasn’t meditating – when it seemed that thought was a useful tool that I was using to figure out hard problems, to learn, and to make sense of the world. So I wondered: what’s the difference between the thinking I do when I’m studying for an exam and the the thinking I do when I’m trying to meditate?

I realized that the only difference is whether those thoughts are wanted or unwanted. The thoughts didn’t change but my relationship to them did.

My struggles with unwanted thoughts changed when I began to think of thoughts simply as outputs of brain activity. If you have a brain, you have thoughts. A brain “manufactures” and pumps out thoughts the same way your liver manufactures and pumps out bile. It’s completely natural – the way we’re “designed”.

I started to view myself as the perceiver or receiver of those thoughts, rather than as the originator of them. I realized that I simply don’t know what my next thought was going to be until it arrived in my awareness.

I developed a curiosity around the whole process of thinking and I arrived at my own little practice, which I’m sharing with you now. The begins by asking the brain to “send the next thought.” Then I would watch really closely as the thought began to take shape. It would start as a vague, amorphous blob, then gradually take shape. Then words would be added to it, and what I would describe as a voice, a tone. Finally, it would arrive fully into my awareness, in the form of a spoken sentence or image or series of images. Then I would ask my brain to produce and send me another thought, then another.

It can be quite fascinating to just watch your thoughts take shape like this They come from somewhere that isn’t accessible to awareness, they travel closer and closer to awareness, taking on clearer and more distinct shape as they come closer, and they finally arrive in finished form. Watching this process completely shifts your experience of the thought and your relationship to it.

I suggest you try this practice for yourself. Sit quietly and ask your brain to produce a thought and send it to your awareness, then pay really close attention to the process as it unfolds. You’ll find that the content of the thought is much less important than it usually is. And the thought has less impact on how you experience the world when it does arrive. It holds very little sway over you. It ceases to be your master.

Paying attention to this process makes your thoughts less solid, less substantial, and less impactful. Thought, in the end, is neither a master nor a servant, but just a feature of what it’s like to be a human being with a brain. Try this little practice for yourself and see what happens!