BRAIN & MIND - Difference between Thinking and Awareness

Let us explore in more detail difference between thinking and awareness:

• Awareness is silent, whereas thinking creates a commentary in words and pictures.
• Awareness is receptive and formless, whereas thinking is active, and has form in words and pictures.
• Awareness is always in the present. Thinking use of memory and imagination, projects into the future or the past.
• Awareness is still and unchanging; it is the same now as it was five minutes ago and five years ago. Thinking, by contrast, is always changing (like all the contents of awareness).
• Awareness, being silent, is also by its nature accepting and non-judgemental. Thinking labels interprets and evaluates. Thinking is frequently judgemental: it struggles to understand, solve, improve or fix things. Awareness is the capacity to simply observe what is in this current moment.

Thinking and Awareness
Awareness is the still, silent background or our being; it is the alert presence that pays attention to everything we experience without judging.

Awareness is sometimes described as the ‘witness’, whereas the thinking mind is the ‘judge’.

The Nature of Awareness

Mindfulness of Breath simply involves developing more awareness of the nature flow of your breathing.

As you practice, you become more aware and your mind gradually becomes less dominated by thinking. But what is the difference between thinking and awareness?

The content of your awareness include sensations, feelings, thoughts, impulses and instincts.

The contents of your awareness are always changing, always moving, but the awareness is always still and constant. The contents appear, they change and they disappear. Thinking is one of the content of awareness, one of the components of our present moment experience.

But when thinking dominates our attention, we lose contact with

our present moment experience . Mindfulness helps us to release the domination of the thinking mind so we can ‘come to our senses’.

The Nature of Thinking

Thinking and awareness: Thoughts are ideas, images or concepts in the mind. Take few moments to close your eyes and think about what you might be doing this weekend.

In particular, notice what form the thoughts take. Perhaps you are planning to go beach, and in your mind find yourself saying, ‘I am going to the beach’, while seeing images of your towels, sand and waves breaking.

You might have noticed that your thoughts take form of words or pictureswhich may evoke certain feeling associations.

Thinking uses imagination and memory in the form of mental words and pictures. Using memory and imagination involves us in projecting our attention away from our present moment experience.

Thinking gives us the ability to focus our attention and speculate on possibilities for the future, or focus our attention on recalling experiences from the past.

Used creatively and appropriately, the thinking mind gives us huge potential for growth. However used habitually and excessively, the thinking mind creates too much control and can act as a defence mechanism, a defence from feeling emotions directly .

Some beginners to meditation initially feel anxious when they meditate because they find themselves letting go of some of their control and defensiveness. Some even find it challenging to close their eyes when meditation in a group.

However this unconscious control and defence will only prolong the stress responseand make it difficult for us to relax, trust and let go.

Thinking and awareness: It is useful to remember that thinking mind is s goal-oriented, problem-solving mechanism.

The thinking mind sees everything as a mean to an end. The thinking commentary of words and images in the mind are mostly trying to help us to stay alive and then to anticipate and avoid physical, emotional and psychological pain, while we maximize pleasure, comfort and ease.

The tools used by the thinking mind to avoid pain and achieve safety and comfort are;

• Planning;
• Judging;
• Evaluating;
• Comparing;
• Analyzing;
• Interpreting
• Labeling/categorizing/naming;
• Speculating;
• Anticipating;
• Remembering.

By judging, evaluating and comparing, the thinking mind places a value on our experience. This value falls somewhere along a spectrum of good to bad, right to wrong, like to dislike, agree to disagree, love to hate. ‘I like by sister’, ‘ I don’t agree with him’, ‘she’s funny, I like her’ etc.

The thinking mind often reinforces old values and holds on to old ways of seeing things. Memory assists in holding on to old associations.

Have a better understanding now of the difference between thinking and awareness?