Proliferative Thinking

A few days ago, I was listening to a dharma talk on my iPod while riding the subway. I love downloading dharma talk via podcast, and Zencast has a ton of them. Anyway, this particular dharma talk addressed thinking.
I won't try to break down the entire podcast, as it was rather lengthy, but I want to single out one idea that Ajahn Amaro brought up, and that is the idea of "papancha."
Papancha, translated as mental proliferating, is what happens when your mind comes into contact with a sense object, via the portal of one of the senses. A smell, a taste, a glimpse of something; all of which leaves an impression on what is considered the sixth sense in Buddhist psychology, the mind.
As human beings, with minds trained to think symbolically, coming into contact with a sense object doesn't merely end with acknowledging that object. The mind starts to weave at first a simple tale, and then a complex one, until finally the mind has constructed the most elaborate tale it can tell itself, all from contact with the object in question.
Take, for example, a coffee mug. Let's say it's a pink ceramic mug that you happen to see in a window while walking along the street. It's a rather nice mug. In fact, it looks very much like the mug your girlfriend used to use. Well, ex-girlfriend. She used to have a mug like that. She always used to drink Folgers in it. I'm a bustelo man myself, you think. Could never stand Folgers. But, she always used to brew it. Then she would always have a second cup in the afternoon. I wonder whatever happened to her? She was kind of nice, although some of her habits drove me crazy. Leaving her dirty mug on the table was one of them. With the Folgers in it; ghastly stuff. You know, if not for that coffee, we might still be together now...
Just like that, the mind is off and running. And it happens all the time. We do it constantly. We never just simply come into contact with a sense object, and leave it at that. Now, maybe in some cases that's good, as I'm sure a lot of great literature has been inspired by papancha. Mark Twain once quipped, "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened." In his case, it was definitely good that he could commiserate with such miseries, and then go on to write about them.
For most of us, we could make creative use of papancha also, and we do. Our minds spin whole tales about future events, based on an object important (or not so important) to us. This in itself is okay, so long as we realize that we're doing it, and make use of it. It's when papancha sweeps our minds along without our realizing it, or being in control of it, that it becomes a symptom of ego grasping, and a component of suffering. Twain, at least, had the sense to know that most of his misfortunes never happened, but many of us act as if the stories we tell ourselves are happening. Consequently, we suffer.
So what do we do? Close ourselves off to sense objects? Be boring and pedantic regarding the everyday? My personal take is that so long as we are aware of mental proliferating we need not fear it. It's just a function of the mind. Eido roshi has said that the function of the mind is to think, and this function has served human beings well over the span of our existence on Earth. Artificially arresting thoughts, therefore, isn't the answer. As Ajahn Amaro has said in the course of his talk, you can come to a state of no-thinking, yet still find that you're suffering. Not-thinking isn't necessarily Nirvana. The purpose of this entry isn't to explain what Nirvana is. I would like to say that papancha isn't something we need be on guard about. Not being aware of it, is something we must definitely be on guard about.