| | Jackson's advice is great. In mahasi-style noting meditation you can use the thoughts themselves as object, and learn very interesting things. For instance, here is a question you might try to answer by systematically noting thoughts:
--- Why is it that some perceptions are very easily noticed, while others seem to be very hard to catch?
E.g., if someone where to whisper your name during your meditation practice, you would certainly notice it. However, even though mental chatter might be just as intense as a whisper, or even more (to the point that it interferes with whatever you are trying to do), still, despite this, you will often not notice your thought stream until you are in the middle of very strong currents.
Why?
If you investigate very insistently and carefully, you will discover that the mind has a mechanism to "hide" certain perceptions. This mechanism is what Buddhist literature calls Ignorance, and is just one among three annoying things that the mind will do, and which help it maintain the illusion of a separate self; these three things are what Buddhists call Aversion, Attachment and Ignorance.
Ignorance works like this: as a perception arises, the mind will very quickly "touch" the perception, and "blink". (Here I don't mean the "awareness" aspect of the mind, but the "phenomenal" aspect of the mind, i.e., your brain and nervous system)
That's it, touch and blink. The reason that you have such a hard time being aware of your thoughts live as they happen is because the mind will systematically touch and blink thoughts. There is a way to have the mind not touch and blink out a thought. Try to think intentionally: "my name is Daniel". Notice how clearly and vividly the thought appears in your mind. If all those thoughts that interrupted your meditation where to seem this loud, then you would never drift off. However, what you might have not noticed was that the "touch and blink" thing still happened! Can you guess where? Well, where you aware of your intention of thinking the thought? Probably not, and if so, then it was exactly for the same reason: as the "intention of thinking" arose in your mind, the Ignorance mechanism touched it and blinked it out.
Now try the following exercise: stand on your feet, with the purpose of eventually making one step forward. The idea of the exercise is to catch the intention of stepping forward as it arises. Just stand there, wait a little, eventually you decide to step forward. Catch this decision-intention as it arises. If it seems hard to catch, maybe actually go on and take a step or two, paying a lot of attention to the whole process. Experiment with this. Eventually you will find out two things: 1) The intention is very subtle and hard to be aware of, but it is there, and forms as a sort of "condensation" of very subtle proto-thought happening on the background of the mind. 2) The intention is not you; you are that which is aware of the intention arising (primordial awareness, pure bliss consciousness, emptiness, zen, shiva, empty space, etc, whatever you want to call it). So the intention actually arises by itself, just like every other phenomenon, following a causal chain of previous events (e.g. you having read this post).
The other two mechanisms, attachment and aversion, also work by "touching" a perception and "distorting" it in some way. Attachment will make your mind "incline towards" the perception as if it wanted the perception to be more intense and abundant than it actually is, and aversion will make your mind "push away" the perception, as if it wanted to make the perception to go away by pushing it really hard. I can't suggest a specific exercise for catching aversion and attachment "in action," but being able to do it with ignorance should help.
Equanimity = zero attachment + zero aversion
The less "ignorance" there is, the deeper will your consciousness go. You will actually become conscious of things that used to be subconscious. Of course there are other ways of being unconscious of stuff, such as too much mental noise, stuff that is too subtle, etc. Mental noise will decrease as the nervous system gets purified. Although the purification process may occasionally release stuff which adds more noise, the tendency is for greater inner silence, and thus deeper consciousness.
So that's what I have to say about thoughts. Mind you this is just my personal interpretation of my own experience, I may be getting a lot of stuff wrong or inaccurately.
One more thing: using thoughts as concentration-object isn't the only way to use thoughts productively in meditation. There is a form of meditation called "mantra meditation" that can be used to do just that. Basically you think a specific thought-sound in repetition. This thought sound, called "mantra," is chosen for having specific properties.
To me mantra meditation is the most powerful method I know of to purify the nervous system, but of course that might vary from person to person. You can find a nice, practical, easy description of such a meditation at www.aypsite.org
Good luck, I'd love to hear it if you try the exercise, and see if our experiences match :-)
Bruno |