Zen teaches students to use a short mantra as a reset thought.
I was more-or-less with you up to this point. Perhaps you are confusing mantras and koans?
Also, it doesn’t sound like you’ve understood my point about “can’t decide not to have thoughts”. Your technique simply replaces one thought with another. I meant that we can’t choose not to have thoughts at all, only train ourselves to not follow them, or to replace them with other things.
Such training also does not constitute deciding not to have a thought, although you can certainly decide to apply the training or a technique to a particular thought or range of thoughts.
Zen teaches students to use a short mantra as a reset thought.
I was more-or-less with you up to this point. Perhaps you are confusing mantras and koans?
No, I am not. A mantra is a prepared thought that is used as a successor to unwanted thoughts, in order to force them out. It is not the only thing which can serve this purpose, but it is optimized for it. In fact, any thought will do, provided it is readily accessible; but a thought which takes awhile to generate won’t work, because the unwanted thought will continue and take hold in the mean time. This is usually either explained badly, under-emphasized, or not mentioned at all, but Crowley, at least, addresses it when he says “any intruding thoughts are thrown off by the mantra, just as pieces of putty would be from a fly-wheel” (in chapter 2).
Also, it doesn’t sound like you’ve understood my point about “can’t decide not to have thoughts”. Your technique simply replaces one thought with another. I meant that we can’t choose not to have thoughts at all, only train ourselves to not follow them, or to replace them with other things.
We seem to be talking past eachother here. By “not have a thought”, I mean that we can prevent a specific thought (such as a song or a political topic) from manifesting, not that we can stop thinking about all things entirely. I have noticed that if you consistently replace a thought quickly enough after it first manifests, then it will stop manifesting in the first place. Of course, if you replace the thought “X” with thought “it is bad to think X”, then X is still active in your mind, hence the need for something completely unrelated but which uses the same part of the brain to displace it with.
Such training also does not constitute deciding not to have a thought, although you can certainly decide to apply the training or a technique to a particular thought or range of thoughts.
Here, it seems we disagree only on the number of levels of indirection. If you decide to apply a technique to cause yourself to not have a thought, then that is the same as deciding to not have that thought. The technique is an implementation detail which is necessary after you make the decision, but not does not factor into the decision itself.
No, I am not. A mantra is a prepared thought that is used as a successor to unwanted thoughts, in order to force them out.
Um, no. That’s a koan.
A mantra is a sequence of sounds that is considered capable of causing transformation—it’s often a meaningful expression relating to spirituality.
A koan is intended to be inaccessible to rational thought—meditating upon a koan sufficiently should cause you to stop thinking and instead ‘become one with the koan’, arriving at its meaning entirely through intuition.
Some schools regard koans as actually containing teachings, while others regard them as meaningless statements to be repeated over and over to remove thoughts from the mind.
I was more-or-less with you up to this point. Perhaps you are confusing mantras and koans?
Also, it doesn’t sound like you’ve understood my point about “can’t decide not to have thoughts”. Your technique simply replaces one thought with another. I meant that we can’t choose not to have thoughts at all, only train ourselves to not follow them, or to replace them with other things.
Such training also does not constitute deciding not to have a thought, although you can certainly decide to apply the training or a technique to a particular thought or range of thoughts.
No, I am not. A mantra is a prepared thought that is used as a successor to unwanted thoughts, in order to force them out. It is not the only thing which can serve this purpose, but it is optimized for it. In fact, any thought will do, provided it is readily accessible; but a thought which takes awhile to generate won’t work, because the unwanted thought will continue and take hold in the mean time. This is usually either explained badly, under-emphasized, or not mentioned at all, but Crowley, at least, addresses it when he says “any intruding thoughts are thrown off by the mantra, just as pieces of putty would be from a fly-wheel” (in chapter 2).
We seem to be talking past eachother here. By “not have a thought”, I mean that we can prevent a specific thought (such as a song or a political topic) from manifesting, not that we can stop thinking about all things entirely. I have noticed that if you consistently replace a thought quickly enough after it first manifests, then it will stop manifesting in the first place. Of course, if you replace the thought “X” with thought “it is bad to think X”, then X is still active in your mind, hence the need for something completely unrelated but which uses the same part of the brain to displace it with.
Here, it seems we disagree only on the number of levels of indirection. If you decide to apply a technique to cause yourself to not have a thought, then that is the same as deciding to not have that thought. The technique is an implementation detail which is necessary after you make the decision, but not does not factor into the decision itself.
Um, no. That’s a koan.
A mantra is a sequence of sounds that is considered capable of causing transformation—it’s often a meaningful expression relating to spirituality.
A koan is intended to be inaccessible to rational thought—meditating upon a koan sufficiently should cause you to stop thinking and instead ‘become one with the koan’, arriving at its meaning entirely through intuition.
Some schools regard koans as actually containing teachings, while others regard them as meaningless statements to be repeated over and over to remove thoughts from the mind.
I’m not sure whether my use of the word ‘mantra’ is correct, but I am reasonably certain that koans are not suitable for the purpose I described.