I had learned to resist the temptations of low quality distracting thoughts, but all that happened was that my mind came up with more creative, more clever, more insightful, and more distracting thoughts.
That sounds very useful to me, actually. Many people have problems coming up with interesting or original thoughts.
I suppose the question is how does one gain from the clever/creative/insightful thoughts while not sabotaging the meditation; keeping a pad to write down the thoughts might work.
A new thought occurs, you write it down, and if it tries to re-occur, you know it’s already written down and don’t pedal any more. Then later when you aren’t meditating, you have the thoughts handy.
Before doing that, I would first experiment with just how volatile those insights really are.
For example, put a bowl in front of me and a pile of small rocks, and every time I have what feels like a clever/creative/insightful thought put a rock in the bowl, then forget about it. Afterwards, try to remember what my insights were, and compare the total to see how many I forgot.
If it turns out that I can remember them later, then I don’t need pads and etc.
(This was, incidentally, a glorious moment in my recovery, when my memory improved to the point that I didn’t have to rehearse things constantly in order to stand a chance of remembering them when I needed them, but could instead let them go in the confidence that I could get them back later.)
Ah. I couldn’t do that—either I remember it, in which case it was on my mind the entire time and ruined the meditation, or I forget it, in which case I feel regretful and obviously can’t act on whatever occurred to me.
Might I ask what kind of recovery you were talking about? And how it came to be?
I can very much emphasize with having to loop thoughts to keep them, and if there’s something that you did to improve your memory, I’d be extremely interested in trying it.
Even accepting that I don’t know if it will work for me, it’s still way better than having no approach.
That sounds very useful to me, actually. Many people have problems coming up with interesting or original thoughts.
I suppose the question is how does one gain from the clever/creative/insightful thoughts while not sabotaging the meditation; keeping a pad to write down the thoughts might work.
A new thought occurs, you write it down, and if it tries to re-occur, you know it’s already written down and don’t pedal any more. Then later when you aren’t meditating, you have the thoughts handy.
Before doing that, I would first experiment with just how volatile those insights really are.
For example, put a bowl in front of me and a pile of small rocks, and every time I have what feels like a clever/creative/insightful thought put a rock in the bowl, then forget about it. Afterwards, try to remember what my insights were, and compare the total to see how many I forgot.
If it turns out that I can remember them later, then I don’t need pads and etc.
(This was, incidentally, a glorious moment in my recovery, when my memory improved to the point that I didn’t have to rehearse things constantly in order to stand a chance of remembering them when I needed them, but could instead let them go in the confidence that I could get them back later.)
Ah. I couldn’t do that—either I remember it, in which case it was on my mind the entire time and ruined the meditation, or I forget it, in which case I feel regretful and obviously can’t act on whatever occurred to me.
Might I ask what kind of recovery you were talking about? And how it came to be?
I can very much emphasize with having to loop thoughts to keep them, and if there’s something that you did to improve your memory, I’d be extremely interested in trying it. Even accepting that I don’t know if it will work for me, it’s still way better than having no approach.
I’m glad that you got better!