Growing up, we were a cat family. This didn’t work out well for my younger brother, John, who was a dog person through and through. He solved the problem by simply pretending Winklemeyer was a dog. He never once let up on the claim. Much later when he was in control of his pets, he switched over to real dogs, so he clearly knew he was spinning a fiction. At the time you couldn’t know that for sure; he was awfully committed to his version of reality.

At a certain point you might worry about a person who insists on clear fictions being realities, but the truth is we all believe a great deal of what we think, even if what we think is ridiculous. After all, we think it. We wouldn’t think it if it wasn’t true, besides which it feels true, and feelings are undeniably real. It’s almost as if we receive our thoughts as commandments, not to be denied. Back in college a friend of mine doing her student teaching told me about a freshman who turned in a research paper full of facts and figures but no citations. She asked him where he got his information. He gave her a knowing look and tapped his head as if to say, “Right here. Pretty impressive, huh?”

I have laughed at the absurdity of that so many times over the years and yet I have found myself trapped in thoughts that have just as little research substance. Tracked back diligently enough, I am finding no small number of my limiting or black and white thoughts can be traced to a handful of foundational experiences from childhood. As Joseph Goldstein, Buddhist monk and meditation teacher points out, “What happened in our childhood is not nearly as important as what we think about what happened in our childhood.” It’s more than a little disconcerting to consider how much a first grader may be doing my thinking for me.

What we’re fundamentally dealing with here is what psychiatrist Dr. Mark Epstein* calls, “The insubstantiality of thought.” Basically, he’s reminding us that thoughts are nothing. They have no substance in and of themselves. They are not a piece of cake we can put on a plate and hand to someone with both of us in agreement that what we have here in front of us is a piece of chocolate cake. But that’s not how we treat thoughts. We treat them as bona fide solid objects that stand up on their own.

After writing that paragraph I took myself on a walk to watch my thoughts, to see if I could grasp the nothingness of them. One thought has really had me by the throat lately, so it wasn’t long before this thought wandered in as I walked along. With keen watchfulness I could feel how solidly committed to the thought I was. As I tried to visualize passing my hand through it like thin air my chest constricted. It was like I was defending the thought. Or the thought was defending itself, I’m not sure which. Not until I imagined trying to hand the thought to someone as I would a piece of cake on a plate did I make any headway with nothingness. To me cake must be real. It’s the language I speak. I will not be a part of handing someone an empty plate of so-called cake.

Since then, I’ve been watching the insubstantiality of my thoughts and am beginning to get better at it. For instance, over the weekend I saw myself thinking, “I’m so tired but I have to get the walk in, and go to the softball game, and run the errands, and get the grocery shopping done before I can go home and have lunch.” But then I started pushing the thought around. Where did I get the message that no rest comes until the work is done? (First grade.) I slowly passed my hand through the thin air in front of me and went home for lunch. (I no longer need cake to get to the insubstantiality of things; cake was just my way in.)

All my troublesome thoughts don’t all fold so nicely for lunch as that one did. For some thoughts I walk many miles to find the truth of their nothingness only to get up the next day and need to find it all over again. But now I know the nothingness is there, waiting to be discovered.

A complication: with every thought there is a feeling

While thoughts may be nothing, feelings are real. As meditation teacher Vinny Ferraro points out, “While the thought may be insubstantial and untrue, the suffering it causes is very real.” This is where we might take a beat from my brother, John, in re-purposing Winkle from cat to dog. He seemed to understand that thought is not constrained by form or substance or reality and simply made the decision to adjust his thoughts in a way that served him better.

Watching our thoughts and relating to them differently is not about revising history. It’s about first understanding where that message is coming from and investigating whether that thought really is — or needs to be — as solid as it so truly feels. What’s the source?  Where did it all begin? What factors were in play the day that passing thought got reified? What factors are in play with our passing thoughts today and do we really want to lay them down in concrete? Or can we go forward with a certain lightness around our thoughts, knowing they can be tracked back and back and back to nothing much, a flicker of light, a rustling leaf, our attachment its only weight.

On average there are 70,000 thoughts passing through our mind every day. We are not those 70,000 thoughts. We owe them no allegiance. They are not commandments or absolutes. Ultimately, their insubstantiality is our freedom. Freedom to watch our hand pass through the nothingness. Freedom to choose a cat or a dog.

To freedom,

E

*Dr. Mark Epstein is a noted psychiatrist who has written several books about the interface between Buddhism and psychotherapy.

One last thought: if thoughts are insubstantial, what does that make our stories? I was just making one up on my way to click send. I’m so glad it’s nothing.