AT TIMES, WE ALL NEED THIS IN SOME WAY
The first time I understood the power of this was at a time when I needed it most. It was the beginning of my life changes, at a point where I had to make changes… but I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know who to ask, didn’t have the courage or clarity to talk to anyone about it… yet I needed answers. Or at least, I needed to talk things out. But there was no one I felt I could talk to.
During that time I was losing health fast, losing all stability, losing home, work, relationships. I was beginning to grasp at anything… I began to practically live at the library, with the self-help books, spiritual and religious books, anything that might answer my deep unhappiness and confusion. But nothing scratched the itch, they were all too concentrated upon systems, religions, new beliefs to adopt, practices to learn, and I knew that wasn’t the path I wanted to walk down. I didn’t want to follow and obey, I wanted to discover and be free.
Things for me were so acutely stressful and terrifying, and I was so trapped and unknowing of where to find the right kind of help, help that felt right intrinsically to me. One evening, when the fear and stress became especially excruciating, I went out to walk on the seaside promenade at midnight. I walked to a viewpoint that jutted out into the ocean, stepped over the chain fence, stepped over the boulders in the water, and stood on the last one, a big boulder rising about six feet above the water. I looked out on the ocean, up at the stars, back at the city, the red-barked Arbutus trees, smelled the salty sea air. I was alone, it was late, there were no other strollers, and this little area had some privacy with the low-hanging trees around it. Looking back, I can see that I was reaching out, powerfully asking, yet didn’t know who to ask, or what to ask for. I looked out upon the expanse of sea as if perhaps that very openness would somehow give me an answer.
I JUST NEED SOME CLARITY! PLEASE!
I had never done this before that moment, and I didn’t plan to do it: I suddenly asked a question out loud, to the night. The thoughts in my head were so confused, so mushy and unclear, I just needed some immediate clarity, right now! I asked it in a full sentence, clearly, concisely, and with an openness that begged for a response… of any kind: “What do I do?” It was like years of silent screaming and asking suddenly came out in a calm, spoken question. And I remember that the overriding feeling was not so much needing an answer… but needing clarity. It was almost like the words were secondary, the most important thing was to somehow alter my thoughts from hazy and unclear, to clear.
Immediately, I answered myself. I didn’t think about the answer, any more than I had thought out the question; it was all done in the moment, without any thought of what I’d say, without any conscious thought that I was asking a question or answering it. It ‘just came’. And that was the first time I let my thoughts leak out into a clear sentence, into clear copy, as you’d read it or hear it from someone talking… yet it was done only for myself.
And it helped. This felt totally new to me, it was not a process I’d read about at that time. Back then, in my younger years, my only experience with people who carried on conversations, questions and answers with themselves, was with ‘crazy people’ who really thought they were talking with separate people. But it suddenly made perfect sense to do this, and I had no feeling that I was talking to anyone else, to God, to a different personality, or ‘voices’. Right from the beginning I knew that this was simply a ‘mind-tool’, that it let me ask questions as a subjective person who really needed answers from anywhere, and then it allowed me to ‘let go’ of that subjectivity, set up an alternate part of my thoughts to be objective, to not think things out or worry about the answer. To just talk.
THINKING IS MUSH
Thinking is a messy activity. Have you ever taken a look into your way of thinking? I don’t mean what you’re thinking about, I mean how you think. It is messy. If we were able to write out even a few minutes of thought, in the exact order and form it was when passing through our heads, what would it look like? I’ll tell you: it will look like a pot of alphabet soup, a stack of photographs and videos, some cut-up newspaper sentences and headlines of different sizes, all thrown into the air at once, mixing and swirling through each other on its way back down.
We do not think in a polite, orderly manner. In any given minute, we could think about part of a conversation we had, some meeting we are about to have; that could trigger some pleasant or fearful thoughts and emotions, which could lead to sudden remembrances of a past event, or a daydream of a future event; then we leap to humming a song we like, then our attention is nudged by someone saying hi, or a flashy or loud car driving by; then we think about how that driver is showing off, yet we wish we had that car, then we think about making more money, then the bills we already have, then look at that neat item in the window, maybe we should go in this store, then… do you see? Our thoughts free-form through countless circumstances, always dashing from the previous to the now to the next. Our minds are like a TV remote with both the ‘up’ and ‘down’ channel buttons taped down; the channels are constantly back and forth all over the place, fighting each other for attention, words and images dance a jig, throwing each other around and tossing our minds this way and that.
In other words, our thoughts are mush. If you are a calm, grounded, easygoing person, your thoughts are slow, gentle mush. If you are excitable, high energy, quick, dreaming about a big future and bright ideas, your thoughts are a fast, full-of-excitement mush. But it’s all a discombobulated mush. It always will be, it will never be a ‘combobulated’ mush. Our thoughts have to receive the experience given to us by our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and they experience these subconsciously while having to organize every function in our body, from heartbeat to cell reproduction. On top of that, our minds have to think, consciously. They need to make our bodies do what we want, go places, create, work, talk. And more than just getting through the day, our minds also have to withstand the massive demand we place on them for emotions, hobbies, TV, music, reading, thinking out relationships, learning… you get it. We cannot just think one thought, and only one thought, through. There’s too much else happening, always. So it’s all thrown together, in a swirl of short films, snippets of moving images and words in the eternal blender that is your mind. Mush.
Mush that never becomes clear, until you make it clear; until you express it outward into a clearer physical form, into ‘clear copy’.
Mind-mush circulates, over and over, like a storage tank with recirculating paddles going round and round through it endlessly. That storage tank can be filled with ambitious thoughts, pleasant thoughts, failure thoughts, success thoughts, hate thoughts, love thoughts, every kind of thought there is, but all those thoughts are blended together and they are all being constantly churned by those recirculating paddles. You learn something, or experience a pain or a pleasure, even at a young age, and you may replay that event, or part of it or the tiniest snippet of emotion or phrase from it… and you will do this with many experiences until the day you die. People who are going through things, good or bad, often say, ‘I can’t stop thinking about it; I’m thinking about it all the time; I’ve thought about this for years; why can’t I get through this, figure it out?’
Here is why: it doesn’t matter how long you think about something, it doesn’t matter how much of your day or life is spent thinking on it. All that matters is how clearly you think about it. How clearly you define the issues, how completely and rationally you understand the ideas, how proactively you try to evolve your knowledge toward a clear knowing. In other words, you can think about something for ten years and it will still be a mush in your head, bothering you, intruding upon and even interrupting your life and the things you want to do. Or you can think it into clear copy… and it might take only a few seconds, or a few minutes, to see the light… to ‘get it’.
WHEN YOU GET IT… CLARITY, PEACE, SPACE ARRIVE
A beautiful thing happens when you clarify your thoughts: most of the mush, about that thing, goes away. Your head becomes quieter, less stressed, less confused, no longer slave to the emotions of excitement, resentment, bitterness, fear that have been kept alive by that unclear mush of thoughts. People nurse resentments, fears, bitterness, doubts, dreams, for years and for decades… when a few minutes of clear thought, with each thing, can illuminate where all that is coming from, why it is there, and how to get past it. Most people – I repeat, most people – will never, ever learn to think those things out clearly, and those bothersome things will steal an enormous amount of time and energy from the entirety of your life. Enormous. Why did you let them?
The ever-present mush of thoughts and emotions is telling you something: those thoughts and emotions want to be heard, to be worked out, to be cleared up. If these thoughts and feelings were already worked out, clear, if you’d already made peace with them… they would not be tugging at you for attention, would they? If a thought or feeling is there, it’s something your mind and body want to be work through, to understand and express, it is something that has still not been dealt with clearly.
Once you know something clearly, know its details and opposites and possibilities and definites, know you’ve covered most of the angles, know what questions are still left, know you won’t forget it even if you never think about it for the next ten years… when you know this thing intimately, you reach a kind of critical mass, a terminal velocity. You earn a feeling of knowingness of it that leaves you quieter, clearer, more peaceful. Even though there will always be more small details – it’s impossible to know everything about a thing, after all – you still get to a place where you feel “Enough; I know enough about this, I see it clearly enough now. The unknown of this is now known; the unknown can’t rule me anymore.”
You relax. You let it go. It’s there, it’s familiar, it’s done, it’s known, there are no longer the overwhelming questions tugging at you to be solved or seen about this issue. Your mind has taken unclear thoughts that were floating inside you as discombobulated pieces, and it has made a clearly defined, solid, real presence of the thing you are working out. You know it, now. So you can let go of recirculating it.
Thinking has never been a problem, for anyone. The problem is in recirculating. Endless recirculation of the same thoughts and feelings, from childhood through old age, with the only difference being the new thoughts we keep adding to that recirculation as we go through life. The beautiful part is that clearing up the mush gets rid of the recirculation naturally, it is not something you need to try for. When a thought is clear, the mush is gone and the thought needs almost no attention anymore, ever. The more things you clear up, the quieter your mind becomes, the less stressful, the more energetic and certain.
HOW DO YOU THINK INTO CLEAR COPY?
The clearer you make your thoughts, the clearer and more complete your knowledge of them becomes. If you make mental notes, or jot down quick written notes, much of your thought or idea has yet to be worked out clearly. If you express your thoughts in proxy, such as expressing yourself in arts like music, dance, painting, sculpture, any craft or expression… you are still making your thoughts into expressed copy, but it is by proxy. You’re expressing some things you feel and think, but you can still be stuck in the rut of those things for the rest of your life, expressing them ‘sideways’ through various activities, but not truly facing them and seeing them clearly.
If you’re angry, you might express that anger through yelling, hitting, harming yourself or someone else; you are expressing your anger, yes, but you are not clearly illuminating the facets of your anger: the seeds that planted anger in you, how you have expressed your anger throughout your life, how your anger affects others, how it affects your own health and relationships, why you have fallen into certain patterns of anger expression, what ‘buttons’ are being pushed that cause you anger, why those buttons are even there. etc etc etc. Apply this concept to all emotions, all things you think, feel do, the good and the bad.
Your chosen methods of thinking into clear copy will vary. You might write a private journal or diary, telling only yourself your secret thoughts and feelings. You might write a book (or a blog) telling of your life, experiences, thought. You might belong to a talk or self-help group. You might talk out loud, alone or to others. You might have ‘conversations with yourself’, as in the Conversations With God book series, and you might do this in writing or by talking out loud, or both. But it’s words. It’s got to come out clearly in words. Words spoken to yourself or others, written to yourself or others, or any mixture of those.
IT’S GOT TO BE CLEAR
Whatever existing or self-invented methods you use, what is important is how clearly you think your thoughts ‘out’ into copy, whether that copy is written, spoken, actioned or crafted. As I wanted to clarify things in my mind to their most piercing truths, I eventually insisted on learning advanced and precise clarification methods. Whether I was talking, emailing, conversing with myself, journaling, I would use the most complete, clear sentences for each idea, as if I were talking or writing them for someone else who had never heard of such a thing. I would speak and write as if I had to make it clear enough for anyone else to understand. If I talked to myself using poor grammar or a fragment of a sentence, I’d begin the statement or question over again using clearer phrasing. Each idea had to become very clear, not mush. Something I could say out loud to someone in a sentence that made sense, something I could write out into hard copy here, for you.
There is a reason the wise people through the centuries have had their words copied down into the written and spoken word. Sage people whose wisdom has withstood the test of decades or centuries had to become clear enough to make their thoughts into some form that other people, the masses, could understand. They had to somehow think into clear copy. The clearer they could communicate their knowledge, the more people would understand.
Whether you can learn the ability to think into clear copy only inside your mind, or whether you begin to write, or talk or converse with yourself out loud or on paper, or use the arts… just doing this isn’t enough to clear your mind. You need to say things in the most complete, clear way you can. You will get better at this.
As you improve at the skill of taking your mushy thoughts and turning them into clear copy, your head will become clearer, your problems will become clearer, your solutions will become clearer, and your life will become clearer.
THINK INTO CLEAR COPY
