Most social intercourse is a study in dysfunction. We
learn to push one another’s buttons and get more or less what we expect,
but we are largely the products of those vast human cookie-cutters called
tradition and culture. As exquisitely social as we become, our expertise
is limited to the consequence of button-pushing, our emotional reactivity,
but not an understanding of how we, and others, become so emotionally
vulnerable as to have buttons that can be pushed to begin with.
Where do we begin the process of understanding of our
own emotional dynamics? We begin by monitoring what goes on within the
confines of our imaginations, and that monitoring begins with the skill of
knowing what we were thinking two minutes ago. Our inner chatter is vastly
instructive and revealing, most of it rife with rationalization,
justification and intellectualization, excuses for our manipulative ploys
in trying to get what we want out of life. Awareness of this inner chatter
is our first step in getting to know ourselves.
We acquire this acquisition of self-knowledge by
learning to silence our inner chatter long enough to analyze it for the
beliefs about our reality that motivate it. We need to know what exactly
we are trying to accomplish within the confines of our daydreams.
We can silence our inner chatter with the ‘count one’
technique. Counting in sequence is distracting. A simple, “one, one, one,”
suffices. A thought intrudes, count ‘one’. Count ‘one’ continuously, if
necessary, to erect a wall of attention against those ten thousand idle
thoughts that assail us during the course of the day. We should spend
portions of the day practicing this skill of maintaining inner silence to
continue, counting ‘one’ aloud, or in our thoughts, silencing our stream
of consciousness and identifying with what is happening.
Our goal is not to stop the internal dialogue, our
‘roof-brain’ chatter, altogether. Our goal is to follow its chains of
logic and association from one subject to another. We have achieved this
goal when we are able, at random, to stop what we are thinking and
backtrack, and to remember what thought or daydream triggered the current
one, and the one prior to that. Only when we are aware of chains of
associative thoughts, fantasies and ideas running through our
consciousness can we ever hope to notice the effect they have on the
events of our lives, or to put it more accurately, how the world we see
outside of ourselves reflects what is happening inside.
Do we really need this inner chatter? We make good use
of it when it solves problems through a process of neutral contemplation.
Often, this is not our intent. We too often use our imaginations as
battering rams against intractable situations and work ourselves into fits
of anger and then depression trying to do within the imagination what we
otherwise refuse to do in our interactive reality with others. And, then,
when our depression lifts, a stray thought triggers another start of fear
and off we go again. We run tapes inside our heads that go round and round
and accomplish absolutely nothing. A few of us are absolutely oblivious to
the process. Ask those individuals what they were thinking a moment ago,
and they have already forgotten, or are unaware of having thought
anything.
It’s a bit spooky to fully realize how readily we
recreate other people, friends, family, associates, and enemies inside our
own psyches with which to conduct our imaginary dramas. Are we aware that
they are not real? Does it ever occur to us that a part of our own
consciousness role-plays their part in our staged fiction-style scenarios,
or do we take their existence inside our fantasy realities seriously?
Daydreaming, the visual component our our internal
dialogue, should not be taken lightly. Turning fantasy-realities loose
inside one’s psyche to pop up at will undermines our ability to respond to
sensory reality and our genuine interaction with others. Once set free
inside ourselves, imaginary characters do not go away. They take up
residence and begin to assume roles they were never assigned. We confer
upon them an independent existence where they continue to add their ‘two
cents’ to the semantic maelstrom that rages within us.
When we suspect that this sounds a bit like insanity,
our insight serves us well. Daydreaming and fiction in general are the
consequence of our ability to extrapolate, to project imagined events into
an imagined future, and to suspend belief. Both fiction and daydreaming
explore the dynamics of our emotional interaction with others vicariously,
without risking life and limb in the process, although we do react
emotionally to these inner dramas, and they do considerable psychological
and physiological harm when we allow these dramas to intensify without
resolution until we are in a state of virtual panic.
So, do we advocate ending daydreaming, the internal
dialogue, and turn our back on fiction for fear of the damage it can do to
the psyche?
Quite the contrary. The fiction in our lives and our
blindly reactive emotional behavior are not evils to be vanquished, just
clumsy strategy. In time, we do grow weary of chasing our own tail, but
the products of our imagination, even when we confuse fantasy for reality,
contain too much potential insight to discard. When we stop our internal
dialogue as a Buddhist is wont to do, we tend to become physically and
psychically still and taking donations to keep ourselves fed. An empty
mind is a psychological lobotomy and stopping uncontrolled internal
dialogue and daydreaming is not in itself the issue. Managing the
tools and resources of the human mind toward the goal of living a varied
and emotionally rewarding life most certainly is.
One way to gain an awareness of the dynamics of the
fiction of our lives is to study the nature of fiction in general. The
best way to understand fiction is to write a bit of it. Unlike daydreams,
we can return to fiction later when it has grown psychologically cold and
see the workings of our own mind with as much objectivity as we'll ever
accomplish. Our imagination is one of our most valuable assets in life and
like intelligence and physical strength, we develop it with use.
