I used to count calories. Objectively, you can’t argue against counting calories.
It works: you eat a certain amount and you gain or lose weight.
But everybody who has tried this knows: I shouldn’t do this. It’s not healthy. You are building a relationship with food that is solely based on weight loss and weight gain. You stop noticing what kind of food you need on any given day.
For me, science is exactly like that. It works. Objectively, you can’t argue against science, but it’s a very rigid, narrow view of life. Life is very little about being objectively right—it’s more about trying things, failing, learning, understanding the magic.
You have a brain,
but you are your whole body at once.
We tend to overrate the brain. A brain is something you carry with you, like a ball under your arm when you walk to the football field.
Your brain and body want to work together.
Working together means:
Walking outside in the sunshine without your headphones and sunglasses on.
Your legs walk.
Your ears hear the environment.
Your eyes see what you have to.
When something happens, you are ready to step in.
Now let’s take the opposite stance:
You sit on the couch at home. Your body is safe, warm, protected. But you are reading the news. Your brain is panicking: what can I do, what is happening in the world? That’s moving out of sync. Your body and brain are torn apart.
There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you don’t do it all the time.
Another example: you walk on the street, listening to music. This is very confusing for your body, since you can’t hear your environment. Your body wants to hear your breathing, the subtle differences in sound, your footsteps, a vague glistening of sunshine. But you have disconnected your brain from your body.
Or you are drinking something with friends, but you have sunglasses on. Nobody can see your eyes, and you can’t see theirs.
You can best explain thoughts using the Buddhist approach (which is actually how you should not do it).
Buddhists don’t understand how thoughts work. When you don’t know something and don’t understand it, it’s tempting to take a negative approach. It’s like two people who don’t know each other: when you distance yourself too much, you start to think the other person is the bad one.
Taking a neutral approach toward thoughts is actually a negative one, since the implication is that daydreaming or “not being present” is bad.
It’s better to flip it: how you approach thoughts says everything about you, not about the thoughts themselves. So when you think daydreaming is bad and that thinking means leaving the present moment, that says everything about how you approach consciousness.
If your mentality toward thoughts is, “Let me daydream 24/7, for weeks in a row—bring it on,” you’ll eventually reach the end of all your thoughts. That is not the same as using Buddhism as a vehicle to get through the day.