Okay. I’m not talking about your brain exactly, but rather your thinking mind. We humans tend to believe that thinking is a necessity for just about everything. When it comes to our day-to-day life, our thinking mind is usually on overdrive, applying itself to every problem and issue we encounter. For many of us, our thinking mind won’t slow down even when we’re doing something that definitely doesn’t require thinking, such as trying to fall asleep. Sound familiar?
Screwdriver Brain
A Phillips head screwdriver is a handy tool. It ends in a little ‘x’ that fits neatly into Phillips head screws. With this screwdriver, you can drive those Phillips screws into wood. Now, a Phillips screwdriver could be used for other things. Combined with a hammer, you could use it to pound a hole through something. You could use it as a prybar. You could use the handle as a sort of low-quality hammer. But the point is that a Phillips screwdriver is a specialized tool. It’s meant for certain things. You’d think someone was pretty strange if you saw them trying to use the screwdriver as a toothbrush, or to write a book, or to eat soup with. Clearly, they’d be using the wrong tool for the job.
Thinking Thinking Thinking
With that image of someone putting toothpaste on the end of a screwdriver and trying to brush their teeth, let’s consider the thinking mind. As difficult as it is to believe, the thinking mind is also a specialized tool. It is very good at taking clear symbolic images and fitting them together in order to solve logic-based problems.
But that’s about all it’s good for.
People don’t usually discover this until they get out of the habit of brushing their teeth with screwdrivers. They might begin learning martial arts, or animal tracking, or dance. Then they discover a huge part of their minds– a part that we don’t really have a good name for but that is called Mushin in Japanese and Wu Wei in Chinese. As this part of the mind is discovered, people find that they can accomplish extremely complex tasks without any thinking at all. Indeed, as soon as the thinking mind intrudes (as it so often habitually does), people will feel a ‘block’ to their actions, finding that what was graceful, easy and natural with Mushin is halting, clumsy and stumbling with Thinking.
In martial arts, the infinitely complex actions of a full-range sparring match become beautiful to watch when Mushin guides the fighters’ minds. In tracking, an immense number of clues — from impressions on the ground to the weather to scents to the lay of land — all these clues come together with intense clarity when someone is engaged in ‘intuitive tracking’. Conversely, when they apply their thinking minds they’ll often get tangled in confusion or fixated on how two clues connect, missing details or the message of the bigger picture.
Natural Brain
What would life be like if we only pulled out our Thinking tool when we needed it? Our minds would usually be very quiet, and our actions would almost always be harmonious with our environments, whether that environment is nature, a social context, or simply lying in bed to go to sleep. Most of the stress, frustration and anger that is born of too much thinking would dissolve.
Learning to Use The Thinking Brain
For most people, our thinking brain uses us. It keeps us awake at night, paralyzes us in over-analyzing almost everything, and constantly tries to intrude on the emotional world. But we do this only out of habit. Breaking that habit isn’t a matter of suppressing our thinking. Instead, it’s a matter of becoming aware of our thinking, so that we know when it’s happening. Then we’ll naturally begin to question the value of constant thought. As things currently stand for most of us, thinking is on auto-pilot, and we don’t even question whether it’s the tool for the job.
Another route toward Mushin is to find a martial arts, meditation, or yoga teacher (or any of various other arts) who knows the value of not speaking too much, of letting you find your place with your physical and mental actions. There are few of them out there, but you can find them if you search carefully.
For me, one of the greatest teachers of Mushin has been nature. Out in the woods or fields it quickly becomes clear that the thinking mind is mostly baggage, and the more time we spend in nature, the more our thinking mind begins to naturally quiet and still.
Whatever your means, it’s a fruitful exploration to see what happens when we stop brushing our teeth with screwdrivers.
