Why Does My Mind Keep Thinking That?
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What does the host’s meditation background reveal about the episode’s focus?
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I've had a meditation practice for about fifteen years now. And I got into it thinking it would calm me down. I've got a little bit of a highly tuned nervous system. And it has done that. But over time and in the periods when the practice is a bit deeper, when I have a little bit more uh grit under its tires, the thing it really seems to do is alienate me from my own mind. I watch what is playing. On the projector of my psyche. And I think Why? Why did I or something in here, some part of me, load up that particular film? Why are we thinking about that? Or even more often, why are we thinking about that again? And there are people who have been thinking about and exploring this strange way the mind actually works for a very long time.
One of them whose work I've long been interested in is Mark Epstein. He is a Buddhist and a psychotherapist. His first big book years ago is called Thoughts Without a Thinker. His most recent book is called The Zen of Therapy. Now a lot of people go to therapy. The fact that it has all these dimensions of mindfulness and awareness in it, it seems normal and natural, but some people built that bridge. And Epstein was one of them. And I've just had this thought for a while. It'd just be interesting to ask him, after his decades of therapeutic practice, his decades of intense meditation. What he's learned about the mind is How does he think about how the mind works? What is the relationship you have to your own thoughts when you realize you're not the one controlling them?
As always my email Ezra Clientshow at NYTimes dot com.
Mark Epstein, welcome to the show.
What a pleasure.
So tell me, after all these years What
do you
think a thought is?
Uh my meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, I was on a retreat with him last year. He said a thought is just a little something more than nothing. So I really liked that. I thought, oh, that's coming out of uh sixty years of his meditation experience. So uh I've I've been repeating that to myself. A little more than nothing.
Your first book had one of my favorite titles for a book, Thoughts Without a Thinker. Yeah. And I think that's the the the part of this that I wanna get at that Strange sense that they just Happen happen. Yeah. Why do they happen?
Well, the person is in a predicament in that they find themselves in a body with a mind, having to make sense out of being in the world. And uh conscious internal subjective thought seems to come along with that realization. So thoughts are in some way what we would call the ego trying to figure out, oh my god, what what do I do in this predicament? The ego mediates between inner and outer and between lower and higher. That's the function of the ego. And thoughts in this way of thinking would be like an extension of the ego, you know, a tool of the ego.
See, I would prefer it, I think, if they felt like a tool well used. The thing that I find very alienating when my meditation practice is a bit deeper and I'm a bit more aware. Is recognition that I'm constantly thinking about things. That if I really were trying to figure out how to live in this world in a productive way, I would not be thinking about all the time. The tendency of thoughts to get stuck, for them to attract to negative imaginings of the future.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What does the host’s meditation background reveal about the episode’s focus?
0:00–5:33
2
Why do recurring thoughts appear out of nowhere and what does that mean?
5:33–15:05
3
How does Mark Epstein define a thought and the ego’s role in thinking?
15:05–18:12
4
What is the Buddhist perspective on the “empty mind” versus the therapist’s view of thoughts?
18:12–24:50
5
How do meditation and psychotherapy differ in their approach to self‑judgment?
24:50–1:08:52