Only Make Plans in Writing

Filed under Articles on 2. January 2007 »

A common issue on the path to spiritual awakening is balancing outwardly focused activity with inner stillness and introspection. The world has an enormous pull, and especially early on in the transformation process it is very easy to get lost in ‘doing.’ The conditioned thought patterns that are the main characteristic of the unconscious state tend to have great momentum, and remaining active in the world while maintaining balance can prove challenging.

One particularly difficult area is planning and goal setting. This is because planning is inherently connected with future-projection, which happens to be where the ego is usually the most active in weaving its illusions. When you set a goal for yourself, it helps to visualize the result you intend to achieve and thus project yourself into a future situation to some degree. But the problems and complications arise when those thoughts are then adopted by the ego and fed into the story of its search for identity and salvation.

As the title suggests, I invite you to change the way you approach planning by confining the activity to writing. This may seem like strange advice, and please know that I am not referring to very short term planning like deciding that you are going to have lasagna for dinner tonight. We’re speaking mostly of long term planning here, although this may vary from person to person. A good way of gauging whether or not a goal is appropriate for this method is to see if it is the kind that you can fantasize about. These will in most cases be plans where the goal is somewhere far off in the future, like making a million dollars, going on a long vacation, becoming good at some skill, etc. However, if even your dinner plans have a tendency to become fantasies then it would be helpful to confine these to writing as well.

Unconscious and compulsive planning

Speaking about the ego’s habit of fantasy and future-projection, we are not condemning the act of planning as such; setting a goal for yourself is perfectly fine. I am not suggesting that setting goals is only of service to ego and should be dropped entirely. Some goals are obviously ego motivated, but goals in and of themselves are simply a practical part of operating in the world of form. The mind is a tool, and making plans for the future is one of its many useful applications. It is, however, an aspect of mind that is easily abused, and as we know from the physical world, some tools are more subject to abuse than others.

When this inherently innocent function of our minds is used in the service of ego, the thoughts it produces start to occupy a much larger part of our attention than is necessary for it to serve its practical purpose. I would venture to guess that 99% of our thinking that has to do with future is utterly useless and repetitive. We get lost in mental movie making, either fantasizing or worrying about some imagined future situation, and even give so much attention to the projected result of the goal that we are never able to begin taking the steps necessary to achieve it.

It is helpful at this point to remember why the ego is so preoccupied with the future all the time, and why it is always looking out for the next thing; a new job, a better car, the next vacation, and so on. And while we could fill entire books with the various aspects of the ego’s need for future, the fundamental issue here is identification with form. An inherent aspect of the ego’s fundamental structure is a feeling of lack, of not being complete, and so it spends its energy chasing the carrot of finding fulfillment and completion in the world of form. It is searching for permanence in form, which is temporary by definition.

The ego is always running towards the horizon, thinking that it will finally get to the end of its search. This end is seen in a variety of mental images, but most often it is seen as a place where you will finally have ‘arrived’ — the familiar “when I become financially independent, I will be able to relax and start living” — and at each new arrival, after the honeymoon perhaps, you see another point in the distance that is “really going to be it.”

Because the ego cannot find fulfillment in the world of form, it has to rely on the realm of mental abstraction to provide the promise of future fulfillment. Completion in form is an illusion, and so whenever the illusion is met with reality there is an inevitable disillusionment that follows, which means that in order to keep the illusion going there’s always a need for more and more future-projection.

If we were to look at the content of our mental activity over a period of time, we would notice that there is an almost continuous background ‘noise’ of thought that is concerned with the future. It can be a subtle sense of dissatisfaction that rarely surfaces, or a more acute manifestation where you have the haunting feeling of always wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. You notice how people always seem to be in a hurry to get somewhere and, apart from those who have a plane to catch, most of them are merely running in circles around themselves. Either they are chasing mirage after mirage of illusory points of arrival, or the pattern of seeking has taken them over completely and they are always in frantic pursuit of something without knowing why.

We fear that if we don’t figure everything out, if we cease the continuous mental activity of planning for the future, our lives will collapse or spin out of control. But this is an illusion, and the purpose of the method I am presenting here is for you to become free of its tyranny.

Getting the planning process out of your head

In order to minimize the chance of our plans getting sucked into the unconscious patterns of the ego, it helps to write them down. Although I haven’t read the book yet, one of the core principles in David Allen’s Getting Things Done is supposedly to “get everything out of your head.” Allen also says that your “head is for having ideas, not for holding them,” and this is what we are talking about here.

In the unconscious state, we see the world through mental images made up of labels and concepts we’ve attached to what we perceive. These mental images are often very distorted, and they are so in proportion to how much they rely on concepts that are far removed from our immediate experience. The mental image of what it is like to be a billionaire celebrity is, for most people anyway, more subject to distortion than the mental image we may have of what it is like to be a school teacher.

When you put thoughts on paper they become clearer and less susceptible to this distortion, and the writing then functions much in the same way as a ‘pause’ button does on video players. Imagine a river flowing by with all sorts of bits and pieces floating in the stream; this is your mind, and you are standing on the river bank observing the objects as they go by. Writing your thoughts down can be likened to reaching into the stream and picking up the floating objects for further examination.

I suggest you dedicate a notebook or something similar to this exercise, so that you will have a clearly defined place for your planning activity. This could also be a folder on your computer for text documents, or a piece of software made specifically for writing a journal. Whatever it is, this will now be where all your planning activity takes place. If you find yourself starting to think about your next vacation, buying a better car, etc., stop immediately and make the decision to either keep going through writing or letting go of the thought stream altogether. It is helpful to include all fantasies, not just those associated with actual goals, and so when you find yourself starting to fantasize, either stop or sit down and write them out.

To limit your plans to writing relieves you of having to endure the habitual mind activity of constantly running future-projected mental movies in the background of your everyday life. It removes the planning activity from the realm of abstraction and keeps it more firmly grounded in reality, leaving you free to give attention to whatever it is you can do right now. The constant noise in your head may have become so familiar that you don’t even notice it, just like you don’t notice the hum of an air conditioner in a room until it is turned off, and so the inner silence may give you a level of clarity and freedom you never thought possible.

At the time of writing it is the beginning of a new year, a time where many people reflect on their lives and make plans for the future. And I now invite you to add another goal to your list of resolutions: to cultivate a habit of limiting your planning activity to writing only.

The sense of peace and relaxation that comes with having freed yourself from the mental noise of compulsive planning will be your main reward, but as a by-product you will also find reward in the ability to make plans with a newfound sense of clarity, and also the ability to reach your goals effortlessly and without stress.