How to stop thoughts

The first article on consciousness I ever wrote.

Introduction (written in 2025)

I wrote this article almost twenty years ago and no longer agree with everything it says, but I keep it in print so I can cite it in newer writings. It contains a number of mistakes which I’ll list in a postscript at the bottom.

This article is based on a discovery I made in 2001 or 2002 when I realized to my astonishment that I had been unconscious during nearly every waking minute of my entire life. At least that’s how it seemed to me at the time. That moment of discovery was and still is the most surprising thing that has ever happened to me.

For five or six years afterward I searched diligently for a description of the experience in books but failed to find one, so I wrote this article and published it on a website I created for that purpose.

The original 2007 article

There are a number of techniques for silencing thoughts. Only one of these methods, so far as I know, leads to Self-realization. It has been described in a variety of ways by different people. Here is my attempt to explain how to do it.

This method is based on a certain state of mind that you can get into voluntarily. Thoughts cannot occur while you’re in this state. The longer you stay in this state, the less effort is needed to maintain it, and the weaker the impulses become that tend to generate thought.

I’ll call this mental state “the aware state.” Other people have called it I AM, self-remembering, awareness watching awareness, abiding as yourself, and knowing that you are. Although these names sound different they all refer to the same thing.

To learn this method from this article, two steps are required:

1. You have to figure out what I mean by “aware state” and experience that state for yourself and recognize it.

2. After you know what the aware state feels like, you have to learn to make it happen deliberately.

Step one: Recognize the aware state

I suspect that nearly everybody experiences the aware state occasionally without noticing it. Contrary to the impression given by many books, there’s nothing arcane or remote or advanced or difficult about it. It’s a normal, ordinary state of mind.

(I’m using the word “mind” in its ordinary English sense of “consciousness.” Most spiritual books use it in a more restricted sense having to do only with sensation and thought. They do this because the word for “mind” in Indian languages has that restricted meaning. This is one of the reasons why spiritual books in English are so confusing.)

The most difficult thing about step one is figuring out from somebody else’s description what the aware state is exactly. It’s very hard to describe a state of mind, and most of the descriptions in books aren’t very good.

The way I’ll handle this problem is by describing a situation in which the aware state occurs. It’s easier to describe a situation than a state of mind. If you put yourself in this situation, the aware state will occur, and then (I hope!) you’ll know for sure what I’m talking about.

I’m going to assume that you’ve tried to meditate at least once, because that’s when this situation occurs. If you’ve never tried to meditate, you’ll need to stop reading now and meditate for twenty or thirty minutes before you go on. You can meditate in any way you like as long as it involves maintaining your attention in some chosen way. For example, you could try to stay aware of your thoughts. Or you could try to fix your thoughts on a particular object or idea. Or you could try not to have any thoughts at all. Whatever you choose, try to maintain your attention for twenty or thirty minutes. If you lose your concentration during this time, that’s okay (in fact, that’s perfect, as you’ll see in a moment), but as soon as you can, start concentrating again and continue until the time is up.

Now, here’s my description of the aware state.

During meditation everybody has the experience of suddenly realizing that for the previous five or ten minutes they hadn’t been meditating at all. They got lost in daydreams without realizing it. Suddenly they snap back to their senses and realize, "Oops! I lost my concentration and got lost in daydreams for several minutes without noticing it. I only just noticed and remembered this instant that I was supposed to be meditating."

If the last paragraph isn’t familiar to you, try meditating some more until you notice this experience happening to you. The rest of this article won’t make any sense unless you recognize the experience I just described.

What does this experience have to do with the aware state? Well, at the instant that you snap back to your senses, you are momentarily in the aware state. An instant later you will probably begin to berate yourself for abandoning your meditation, causing you to slip back into the ordinary lost-in-thoughts state, but at the very moment in which you come back to yourself, you are in the aware state. (To be precise, you are closer to the aware state at that moment. It’s really a matter of degree.)

Keep putting yourself in situations where this experience happens, and each time, try to notice the heightening of awareness that occurs at that moment.

(Incidentally, if you’ve ever been puzzled by the traditional instruction to look at the space between two thoughts, this is what it’s referring to. At the moment I’m describing, your daydreaming just ended and your next thought hasn’t yet carried you away.)

As you observe these moments more carefully, you’ll begin to see that thinking and awareness are polar opposites. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other. At one end of the continuum, you are lost in thought. At the other end, you are aware.

You can learn to move voluntarily between these two states, but most people remain lost in thought during almost all of their waking hours. They never notice that the aware state exists.

As you observe the difference between the two states you will notice that when you are thinking, you aren’t really conscious. This may sound strange, but you’ll see for yourself that it’s true. When we think, we are actually lost in thought and not aware. When we become aware, we emerge from thoughts. We stop being lost and find something – ourselves. This is why some people call the aware state “self remembering” or “knowing that you are.” Try it, you’ll see. These traditional terms make sense once you see what they refer to.

You’ll also see why most forms of meditation are useless for obtaining Self-realization. Meditation works for this purpose only if it gets you beyond the mind into the aware state, but most people stay in the lost-in-thoughts state when they do it.

Real meditation is remaining in the aware state.

Step two: Learn to enter the aware state deliberately

Once you know what the aware state feels like, you need to learn to enter it deliberately. Here are some tricks that may help:

1. Ask yourself, “Am I conscious now?” You have to really wonder and inspect yourself to see whether you are or not. The act of inspecting yourself to see whether you are conscious causes you to emerge from thought and become conscious. You have to really pay attention when you do this, otherwise the mind will trick you by imagining that you’re conscious even though you aren’t. This trickery is like dreaming that you got out of bed and turned off the alarm clock, when in reality you’re snoring happily in bed.

2. Become very familiar with the aware state. Observe closely what makes it different from being lost in thoughts. It’s not different because a certain sort of thought is happening. It’s different because you’re aware. Notice that if you try to figure out what’s different about it, you’ll plunge right back into being lost in thought. Watch how the initiation of a thought makes it vanish. Go back and forth deliberately between thoughts and awareness. Once you become familiar with how this works, you can learn to do this voluntarily just like wiggling your fingers. It may take a bit of practice, but you really can learn to do it.

3. Always be aware that a thought is starting. If you are aware of it, then you won’t get carried away by it and your awareness won’t get lost. This is the meaning of the traditional instructions “be vigilant,” “be mindful,” “watch your thoughts,” etc. These instructions are potentially misleading because they can be misinterpreted to mean, “Go ahead and daydream.” Perhaps a better way to state this idea is that you should observe very carefully the process by which your awareness starts to slip away when a thought starts. Be on your guard for those events so they won’t happen.

Step three: Make it a habit to always be in awareness

I said there were two steps, but now I’m adding a third. What gives?

Well, if all you want to do is silence your thoughts, then yes, two steps are enough.

But once you’ve learned to remain aware, you might as well take the third step and make it a habit. Do it as much as possible. Try to make it your permanent state.

What will happen if you do? Something interesting. Try it and find out.

Postscript (written in 2025)

What I got wrong in this article:

1. I painted with too broad a brush when I said people are unconscious when lost in thought. It’s more accurate to say they don’t know that they are thinking and don’t know what they are thinking. They have conscious knowledge of their thoughts only retrospectively after they leave the state.

2. There is no single “aware state.” In reality various activities of the brain are attended by different kinds of conscious experiences, and the sense of consciousness is stronger during some activities than others. I hinted at this when I wrote that the aware state is really a matter of degree, but I now realize that states (defined as types of activities) and the sense of consciousness are distinct. Only the sense of consciousness is a matter of degree.

What I got right in this article:

1. I operationalized the definitions of “lost in thought” and “aware state” by giving simple, unambiguous instructions for experiencing them.

2. I recognized that the lost-in-thought state is the mind’s default state. (This article appeared the same year as the first academic paper linking the default mode network and mind wandering, but I didn’t see that paper until years later. Everything in this article is based purely on observation of my own experience.)

3. I focused mainly on consciousness. In contrast, academic literature focuses mainly on contents of consciousness (e.g. mind wandering and attention) which tends to strengthen the tacit assumption that consciousness and its contents are indistinguishable or inextricably bound. This assumption may be holding science back.

A point of clarification:

The article’s natural title is “The aware state” because that’s the main topic but I named it “How to stop thoughts” so more people would stumble across it in search engines. For stumblers who want to get Self-realized, this was a good thing, not a bad one, because for them the real goal is not to stop thoughts but rather to transfer their attention completely from mental activity to consciousness.