“We are what we think.
All that we are arises from our thoughts.
With our thoughts make the world.
Speak and act with an impure mind
And trouble will follow you
As a wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.
We are what we think.
All that we are arises from our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak and act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
as your shadow, unshakable.”
These are the opening lines of The Dhammapada (trans. Thomas Byrom, Alfred A Knopf, 1976), a collection of sayings of Buddha (563-483 B.C.). Researchers believe they were most likely first gathered in the third century B.C and eventually written down in the first century somewhere in Shri Lanka, and later transmitted in Pali.
For me, the opening lines of the Dhammapada speak to the core of Mindfulness training as I have come to practice and understand it. So it comes as no surprise that this would be the opening instruction for a principle scripture in Theravada Buddhism.
Our thoughts are “real but not true,” to quote the phrase coined by Tsoknyi Rimpoche, the Nepalese Buddhist teacher, generally recognized as the sixteenth Karmapa.
Our thoughts are real, in that we hear and experience them. But they are not true, in that they are not actual information. They are internally generated, composed of a mishmash of assumptions, memories, bits of information and conditioning (emphasis on conditioning).
This essay will offer a meditation on the key line, “With our thoughts we make the world,” - to explore the kind of the world we can make - a world that can foster suffering or joy, depending on the thoughts we nurture.
Some years ago I was on a week-long meditation retreat at the Cloud Mountain Center in rural Washington state. Like many retreat centers Cloud Mountain is in the middle of nowhere. It’s out in the rich Washington forest, populated by dormitory-like cabins, walking trails, a small meditation hall and a dining hall.
Three or four days into the retreat I was meditating out on a wooden deck in the woods - alone. It had just rained, so the forest was lush and green with that sweet smell of earth and trees you can only find in the deep damp woods. It was perfect, still. I was sitting, still, with my hands in my lap, focusing on my breath, doing the best I could to watch my thoughts come and go and return to my breathing. Peaceful.
Then I heard it: “You’re screwing this up.” The thought startled me. What could I possibly be screwing up? I’m literally just sitting here, for no other reason than just to sit here breathing in and out in the woods.
Some years earlier a Dharma teacher taught me to say, “I see you Mara,” when I was struggling with self-doubt or other self defeating thoughts. She was referring to the moment just before Buddha awakened and Mara, the god of illusion, was trying to stop the awakening by hurling the illusion of self-doubt at the sitting monk. But Buddha simply opened his eyes, the illusion vanished and he saw Mara sitting naked in front of him. “I see you Mara,” he said. And he was awakened in that moment.
In that moment in the deep woods, it was like I could see sitting Mara naked in front of me, whispering the thought, “you’re screwing this up.” And I recognized that thought is an illusion. And I have been carrying it for decades.
The thought was real. I heard it. I felt it viscerally, as I had felt it before, as a churning in my stomach. But it was not true.
With our thoughts we make the world.
In that moment I could see I no longer had to allow that thought to make my world.
In more than twenty years as a psychotherapist, I’ve come to believe we all have our top five conditioned thoughts that make our lives feel more like fly paper than silk.
Mine include some version of I’m screwing up; I won’t be able t get what I need, etc. Part of mindfulness practice is training the mind to look beyond these thoughts. As we shed the negative energy of our negatively conditioned thinking, our suffering recedes and life gets easier.
“Speak and act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
as your shadow, unshakable.”
That’s not to say that these thoughts don’t still come and go. Of course they do. And I get wrapped up in them a lot of the time. But to quote Sunryu Suzuki Roshi,
“Leave your front door
and your back door open.
Allow your thoughts
to come and go.
Just don’t
serve them tea.”
With our thoughts we make the world.
The question is, what kind of world do we want to make?
In his book Dancing with Life - Buddhist Insights for Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering (Rodale Books, 2012), Phillip Moffett observed that our experience is in two parts: 1) what happens, 2) what we tell ourselves about what happens.
With our thoughts we make the world.
It’s cold, rainy and grey today. The house is cold, we’ve been having issues with the heat. I’m using space heaters, which is driving up my electric bills.
This genuinely sucks and I’m unhappy. That’s one thought.
Or It’s a good day to sit, snug inside and write. I love to write. The heat is a little funky, but I’m so glad I have these space heaters. It’s warm in this room and I’m lucky I have the wherewithal to stay warm - all good.
With our thoughts we make the world…
And happiness will follow…
What am I choosing to tell myself about this experience? What world am I choosing to make?
Today I’m choosing to take a world where I’m happy to be warm inside on an otherwise cold and wet day.
That’s not to minimize the genuine suffering that we experience in the world. We are in the middle of a global pandemic, hundreds of thousands of people have died in the United States alone. People are losing loved ones, livelihoods and homes. We’re isolated and grieving.
I like to choose optimism. But it’s a struggle sometimes. Nonetheless, choosing optimism, as a practice, orients my thoughts to believe that, even though it’s difficult for now, all will be well in the end. That’s the world I’m choosing to make with my thoughts.
I’ve always hated that expression, “pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” It’s always felt arrogant and dismissive. And I would never say that to someone in pain and suffering.
But viewed through the lens of with our thoughts we make the world, it appears that with our thoughts we tend to add additional layers of suffering to our difficult experiences. That is how we add suffering to pain.
In the Sallatha Sutta (trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, 1997) Buddha offered the teaching of the two arrows of suffering. To me this is an echo of the teaching in the Dhammapada.
The first arrow is whatever pain we suffer. In the Sutta it is literally an arrow. But the second arrow is the thoughts we entertain to describe our pain. I’ve often referred to this with therapy clients who are recovering from emotional pain or trauma.
Trauma is real, whether it’s childhood abuse, domestic partner violence, some sort of accident or injury, or the loss of a significant relationship. That’s the first arrow.
But as often as not there are additional layers of shame, guilt, self-doubt or fear that accompany trauma. Such thoughts and feelings color our self image, our sense of safety, our thoughts and assumptions about ourselves and the world around us.
That’s the second arrow.
Now I’m not minimizing the complexity of these issues or the difficult work involved in this kind of healing. Nor am I dismissing the tremendous courage and commitment that it takes to engage this sort of work.
With our thoughts we make the world.
This is nonetheless true of even in in the depths of pain and grief. I’ve seen people reach into their deepest pain, find a path to healing and create an entirely new way of thinking about themselves and the world around them.
With our thoughts we make the world.
The question remains, what kind of world are we going to choose to make?
Becoming aware of our thoughts and how they affect our lives is a slow process that takes practice. A regular Mindfulness practice is extremely helpful with this process. It’s important to keep in mind that the key word here is “practice.” We practice awareness of thoughts much the same way we would practice the piano, or Yoga.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Little by little, one day at a time, we can train ourselves to make a world that is more peaceful, gentle and compassionate.