What Impulse Doesn’t Have

This weekend, I had a thought to go out cycling and in another moment started planning for my next trip. A succession of random thoughts. The spell broke when I decided to cook something — this is not a System 1 but a System 2 activity for me.

When I returned to my writing desk, I read my last piece on my effortless meditation experience. Then reading some of my other blogs and personal notes I wrote in the past, I realised a couple of things. One, I had acted on some of these thoughts and called them “impulsive.” Second, most of the impulses were effortless.

This threw up a question — if both a random impulse and a deep meditative state feel effortless, what actually separates them?

The difference lies in the presence of initial consciousness. Impulsiveness is a random thought that occurs with no conscious direction. It just happens. In contrast, an effortless meditative experience begins with a deliberate conscious intent to meditate — a momentary flicker of awareness. Once that happens though, it doesn’t require sustained effort. It slips into a state of flow.

This difference reveals a change in identity.

In an impulsive state, you are entirely fused with the action. You are the doer. The “I-thought” hitches onto the momentum of the mind and you are pulled along by whatever current arises.

In the effortless meditative state, you shift the angle of perception. You move from being the actor to being the Drishta — the witness. As I had written earlier about that fifteen-minute sit — the mind chatter was there, the body strains were there, but there was a distance. Not the distance of pushing things away. More like a passer-by who happens to be on the same road as everything else.

The seer is not the seen.

By shifting into the role of the observer, the automatic link between a thought and an action breaks. You can notice a thought without being pulled into its momentum. You allow it to sit beside you — a passer-by, nothing more.

What the Move-See-Reflect tells me here — the move to act on impulsiveness, engaging in a System 2 activity made me see the difference between the two. And reflecting on what happened, I realise that despite being knowledgeable about drishta, actually being in it is what makes it a smooth transition to pure observer mode — and the effortlessness follows.