Another explanation/technique for non attachment to thoughts:
Evidenziazione (giallo) - Pagina 110 · Posizione 1661: Goldstein’s seminal 1976 book , The Experience of Insight , makes him a good person to talk to about , well , the experience of insight . Once I pressed him to describe what it’s like to watch your thoughts with detachment ( or , as he prefers to put it , with nonattachment ) ….Goldstein said , ….to “ imagine that every thought that’s arising in your mind is coming from the person next to you . ” How would you be relating to these thoughts then ? His point was that you wouldn’t be identifying with them ... Pagina 111 · Posizione 1666 “ The thought itself is appearing and disappearing like a sound , but being identified with it is something we’re adding . ” I asked , “ So , then , in meditation there can be the sense that thoughts are just kind of coming out of nowhere , so to speak , almost like voices ? ” “ Yeah , ” he answered ….so I added , “ Although it’s not like you’re hearing things . . . literally ? ” “ Yeah , correct . ”……… He seemed to be saying that thoughts , which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious self , are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self , after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self . This , in turn , seemed consistent with the idea that modules generate thoughts outside of consciousness and somehow inject them into consciousness . So I pressed the point . “ Let me see if I have this right .…..“ Correct . And they become a lot less active when we see them for what they are . When we’re not pulled into the drama of them . It’s sort of like going to the movies . We go to the movies and there’s a very absorbing story and we’re pulled into the story and we feel so many emotions . . . excited , afraid , in love . . . . And then we sit back and see these are just pixels of light projected on a screen . Everything we thought is happening is not really happening . It’s the same way with our thoughts . We get caught up in the story , in the drama of them , forgetting their essentially insubstantial nature . ”