The rest of the meeting is a rehash and the glimmer of genius evaporates like the dew on a flower in the desert. It’s a lot like getting so caught up in the scenery that you drive right through your original destination and don’t realize it until you’ve passed the point of no return to your next destination… and the cycle starts all over again from square one. We have experienced way too many such moments. In fact, for both of us authors, that is why we believe Thinking Whole and Thinking Whole have proven so powerful an antidote against the disease of distraction. In pretty much the same way that mnemonics are useful to jogging memory, we included The Focus to help “nudge.”
The great Zen Master, Shunryu Suzuki said: “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”
There’s a great deal of evidence to demonstrate that people have a hard time thinking of nothing. It is extremely difficult if not entirely impossible to so still the mind that it is literally devoid of thought.” That is why mantras were invented; replace the overabundance and multiplicity of thoughts with a single thought.
Mantras are essentially centering chants. Serious practitioners believe that there is much significance to the words being chanted. Buddhist monks repeat the mantra of Buddha himself: “Aum mani padme hum” – the meaning of which is difficult to translate Other, more secular, students of meditation believe that it is not the words but the act of repeating the sound of the mantra that does the trick. For the record, we fall pretty much in between the two.
Whether it’s conscious intention through language or ancillary effect through the cerebral cortex… they both still distraction and improve our ability to be creative. Either way, the mantra is a way to open a space in the mind so that there is a sort of creative void into which your higher thinking can naturally flow. Neuroscientists call this phenomenon highly productive “flow states.”
After a lot of research and analysis, we have concluded that, whenever our sessions begin to feel like they’re unraveling, the mantra to which we subscribe is the penultimately simple: “Seven. Three. One” – repeated as frequently, and often, and as necessary to get Thinking Whole back on track.
The other Eastern concept to which we link this mantra is Lao Tzu’s proposition that human consciousness is governed by three forces – Material, Structure, and Energy. So, when you are either in or conducting a Thinking Whole session that you feel needs to get back on track, chant “Seven. Three, One,” with all the passion and energy you might direct to a favorite basketball team: “Defense. Defense. Defense.” It works in basketball. It works in the military… and it works in Thinking Whole.
The Discipline
“To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.” Lao Tzu The third component of Thinking Whole, after The Form and The Mantra, is The Discipline. To keep The Form uncluttered, functional, and progressing, we need to get every idea to the point of irreducible brevity, clarity, and connectedness to all the other similarly elevated thinking.
How do we do that? Remember all those potentially significant but “not yet ‘there’ ideas” in the parking lot? How do you either get them to a state of eloquent articulation or how do you know you’ve ‘worked’ them enough so you can be certain they are not worth working on anymore? For that, we have what we call “The Discipline.”
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