MN20 is well known, and for good reason—it’s simple and effective. One of the five methods though has never sat quite right with me, the third technique of…
They should try to forget and ignore them
If it were as simple as “just don’t think about it”, then it wouldn’t be a problem in the first place right?
There’s still four other good methods suggested, but I wonder if I’m misunderstanding this one. I don’t have a specific question, simply curious what other people think about this.
Sometimes the easiest solution bears repeating, no?
“Have you tried turning your computer off and on?” is one of the most common troubleshoots there is. And surprisingly, it works a hella lots of time.
I think it would have to be contextual, how you would use any of the 5 techniques.
And it would be according to your own experiences and practice over time, how you would you know when to use one technique over the other.
Sometimes it’obvious which technique to use, if it’s a recurring theme or thought, or if something is ‘sticky’ or ‘thorny’ to you, then you would have to pay attention to it, rather than ignoring it.
But if it’s something that is pithy, or doesn’t mean much, then it’s easier to ignore.
An analogy can be that the thoughts are like kids disturbing the mom by keeping on saying mom, mom.
Ignoring is hearing it but not responding, and eventually maybe even tuning it out as one’s attention is elsewhere and the kids not having the responses they wanted change tactics and became silent, of course, they could increase to stronger tactics first before that.
Just an analogy, not advocating for such actions for young parents.
I assume we are talking about the first technique?
Bhante Sujāto’s note might help (hit the n key)
For example, a meditator who finds themselves plagued with thoughts of annoyance, having recognized that this is happening per MN 19, should switch to a new meditation such as mettā.
I’ve also understood this list as to be sequential. If you can overcome the thinking with this first method, then great. Otherwise you move on to harsher methods further down the list.
Negatory…
I didn’t know about that, I’ve just been hovering! 
Also in the notes:
From time to time” (kālena kālaṁ): these are not fundamentals of meditation like mindfulness, which should always be developed, but rather expedients for dealing with specific problems when they arise. A meditator should be familiar with these methods and apply them when needed. However, one should not be over-eager to reach for these methods; they are meant for those times when the normal process of meditation has gone awry.
The kālena kālaṁ “expedients” have always landed for me as medicine for stopping rumination – for whatever reason the ruminating is happening.
If it’s typically due to trauma or overwhelm, then IMO the medicine must be quick-acting and unusual.
Also, I don’t know what it’s like to be in this category of attainment.
So I don’t spend much time on this sutta.
Take a mendicant who is focusing on some subject that gives rise to bad, unskillful thoughts connected with desire, hate, and delusion. That mendicant should focus on some other subject connected with the skillful. As they do so, those bad thoughts are given up and come to an end.
Let’s say that you’re having a busy day, your mind is occupied with the troubles of the world and you think that you’ll lie down and rest for a spell. You lie down and your mind is still super active and your body feels tense. You can hear noises coming from outside, disturbing your rest and you’re irritated. Then the doorbell rings so you get up, go to the door and it’s over in a moment, so you hurry back to lie down again. After a bit you get up and go back to work.
Let’s say that you’re having a busy day, your mind is occupied with the troubles of the world and you’re getting worked up. It’s rather exhausting so you think that you’ll lie down and rest for a spell. Recalling the satipatthana sutta’s teaching about mindfulness of postures, you lie down and bring your attention to your body. You observe your limbs and different body parts vibrating and you observe the mind chasing thoughts around, agitating the body. You move your attention to the body and, with compassion, you very simply allow it to rest. You observe it relaxing into the cushioning the way it needs to. You notice the mind is still flapping and twirling but you don’t attend to the specific thoughts themselves, you simply compassionately allow the mind to rest, to take a break also. Then you turn your sole attention to the body, not you or your mind’s commentary on it, but just letting the body be, lying down. Then the doorbell rings. You notice the mind getting upset so you switch your attention to the walking posture, You’re just easily walking, lifting your limb, opening the door, saying the minimum without anger, close the door, walk back and lie your body back in the lying posture. You simply know that the body is a body lying down. You can feel fully awake but just quietly, wordlessly observing the body. The unskillful thoughts will be at least temporarily disconnected, likely temporarily forgotten, and you’re fulfilling Right Mindfulness.
I agree with @Pasanna I’ve always understood it to be sequential. As it is a list of permissible actions it needs to be included. If it wasn’t and I found myself doing it I would be in doubt as to it’s efficacy and whether it was a skillful action resulting in wholesome result. The final technique “With teeth clenched and tongue pressed against the roof of the mouth, they should squeeze, squash, and crush mind with mind” would sound rather brutal as a meditation technique if it wasn’t included and therefore permitted and found to be effective.
I wouldn’t regard any of the techniques as “simple”.
Metta Radius
I hadn’t realized this sutta was about meditation—the notes talk about meditators but the sutta itself, I thought, is just talking about life in general.
I obviously was not clear enough in my OP. I was talking about the third technique, which is to simply ignore and forget the unskillful thoughts (thank you to @agilgur5 for clarifying that in the title). I understood that the list is sequential, which is why the third technique seems strange (but apparently only to me). If I had tried the first technique of shifting my attention to something associated with the skillful, but was unable to do so, then it seems unlikely that I would be unable to implement the third technique.
I think I’ll leave it here, I appreciate the time and thoughts.
Think of thoughts like guests, visitors who come into our home. We can entertain the guest; then they might stay longer, but if we totally ignore them, even if they are still in the home, eventually they get bored and leave.
Guests are thoughts; home is the field of awareness we have. Ignoring them means, first, not giving rise to anger or lust/ interest; second, not even knowing them. Actually, the sutta asatiamanasikāro means the second one. It can be translated as not mindful, not paying attention, or forgetting and not paying attention.
There can be a general awareness of “thoughts are there in the mind”, without knowing what the contents of the thoughts are. Attention is on the meditation object.
Sort of like you can be in a concert; you know there are people around you making noise, but your attention is on the singer on stage. You’re ignoring the people around you.
It also has to do with how much one has trained. If the mind is used to knowing that if it bothers us to a certain extent, we will react, then it knows our weakness. If the mind knows that this person can stand not to react to thoughts in the mind, no matter how wild, then the power of those thoughts decreases next time. And they leave sooner. And so on. Every time we just sit and let go, not following unwholesome thoughts, not entertaining them, even not knowing them, they get weaker and weaker.
Like if we message a friend on some platform, and they don’t react to us, we might try 2, 3 times, or more and then we give up on contacting that friend, taking it as a natural loss of friendship. So too, the defiled thoughts may bother us, perhaps more than 2 or 3 times, but eventually our friendship with them gets weaker and we become a stranger to them.
It takes patience to use this method, but it’s quite easy to do once the defilements are weaker, there’s no need to feel like there’s a deliberate effort needed to ignore.
The usual interpretation seems to be that these techniques should be done during meditation, when the meditation “go awry”. I cannot see the sutta in that light. For me, it looks like ways to “master your thoughts” in any circumstance, and one should do them “from time to time” when thoughts “go awry”, that is, when unwholesome thoughts arise.
Take a bhikkhu who is attending to some sign due to which bad, unbeneficial thoughts connected with desire, ill will, and muddledness are arising. That bhikkhu should attend to a different sign connected with the beneficial.
B. Sujato translates nimmita as subject, and interprets it as “a kind of meditation”, but I don’t see that in the text. The first sign that I am interpreting here is that sign which by attending to it, unwholesome thoughts appear. By other suttas it does not appear to be an “object of experience”, which one should not attend to that object because it gives rise to unwholesome.
Each object has multiple signs, and the same object can have signs which make unwholesome thoughts arise, and wholesome thoughts to arise. So, here the Buddha appears to be saying that one should attend to those signs that, when the mind attends to them, the mind start to “produce” wholesome thoughts. He does not explicitly talk about replacement, but about attending that sign concurrently.
The similes are interesting and it appear to showcase the nuances of what should be happening:
It’s like a deft mason or their apprentice who’d knock out or extract a large peg with a finer peg.
I search on Google on how would this work exactly. If I have a wooden peg stuck in a hole, I can use a smaller peg in the center of the larger one and hammer the smaller peg, so the smaller peg is like punching the center of the larger peg. If the Buddha was talking about “thought or subject substitution”, the simile would be more like “remove the larger peg and put a smaller peg in place”.
Now, suppose that despite the bhikkhu attending to a different sign connected with the beneficial, bad, unbeneficial thoughts connected with desire, ill will, and muddledness still arise. He should consider the danger of those thoughts:
‘So these thoughts are unbeneficial, they are blameworthy, and they result in suffering.’
Also, reading the suttas, it appears that one would not choose a technique out of these five, but doing them succesfully one after the other, but doing the next if unwholesome thoughts still arise. In this case, if unwholesome thoughts are arising in this mind, one should recognize the danger of the mind that is producing these thoughts. I see that thinking about these thoughts should point to the mind that is allowing the arising of it, and not about the thoughts itself, since we cannot control the arisen of thoughts. The simile, again, is interesting:
Suppose there was a woman or man who was young, youthful, and fond of adornments. If the carcass of a snake or a dog or a human were hung around their neck, they’d be horrified, repelled, and disgusted.
There is nothing wrong with the carcass of a snake, a dog or a human. They are horrified because the carcass is around their neck and they simply cannot decide by will that there won’t be a carcass around their neck. And now to the polemic part:
Now, suppose that despite the bhikkhu considering the peril of those thoughts, bad, unbeneficial thoughts connected with desire, ill will, and muddledness still arise. He should forget them and not pay attention to them.
The term is asatiamanasikāro, where it is the negative of sati-manasikaro. Literally, it would mean “without-remembering-without-attention”. Now, the common interpretations make that appears as literally to ignore the object of the thoughts and do something else, pretend they are not there, and follow your life. However, of we accepet this as true, based on the previous simile, it would mean like ignoring the carcass around your neck and follow your life, pretend it is not there, so the carcass somehow goes away.
So, first one should attend to a wholesome sign, so the mind can turn to wholesome, the mind is still established on the intention of “thinking thoughts”, second one should, if the previous don’t make the mind turn to wholesome, contemplate the danger of those thoughts so the mind don’t obsess over it and turn to wholesome. In the third step, if the previous don’t work, one should ignore the “thoughts”? Why one didn’t started with this step then? And if that don’t work, follow the current step 1 and 2? This seems like a weird step if one interprets like that.
What if instead of ignoring thoughts, or more precisely, the thought-objects, one should ignore the intention of engaging in these thoughts? The thoughts are there, the intention to engage is one of the possibilities, and the previous steps showed that engaging in any way with them did not worked. Now, the thoughts are still there, the intention to not-engage is there, and one cannot simply forget their existence. Otherwise, this would be the last step. One forgot the thoughts. But, right on the next step, we read:
Now, suppose that despite the bhikkhu ignoring and not paying attention to those thoughts, bad, unbeneficial thoughts connected with desire, ill will, and muddledness still arise.
How can one know that these thoughts still arise if one forgot about them? One should remember them again? If one is ignoring the thoughts, but still know they are there, one is not engaging with them, one has the intention to not-engage with them.
Also, by the introduction, these techniques are for one “committed to the higher mind”, so a person who is at that level. At that level, one already can discern the signs of the mind, at least. So, these techniques are not for everyone, or people who is not at that level cannot confidently practice that correctly. The Buddha said this about the one who master these:
With their abandoning, his mind becomes established, settled, unified, and composed internally.
This is called a bhikkhu who is a master of the ways and modes of thought.
He will think whatever thought he wants to think, and he will not think whatever thought he does not want to think.
In the last phrase one realizes that the point cannot be about what one thinks, but about the attitude one has about what one thinks.
Yes I agree, I use the 3rd method often, just for simple things like say if I’m walking on my way to work and something attractive catches my eye, I can just “close my eyes, or look away”. By doing so, you don’t give it the “fuel” or ahara which could lead to unwholesome states or thoughts.
Wow, very insightful, thanks for that. In a way, things go could in either direction. Just like if you’re in a cross road, you could go in any direction, so you have to choose one that will lead you to wholesome path.
Yes, I’ve learnt recently that it’s all about setting an intention. Intentionality is a key part in following the N8FP. It’s a subtle one, but very important. 
I think for me at least, I like the idea of ‘closing your eyes or looking away’ rather than ‘forget and ignore’, because ignoring has this sense of almost ill-will, not always but it can easily descend into ill-will. Where as ‘closing your eyes or looking away’ is more subtle, and perhaps a gentler approach. Each to their own I guess, whatever works in one’s practice.
In the sutta, the simile of “closing your eyes and look away” is the ignoring part. So, they are the same thing. By instruction of the sutta, this is the third step, after trying the previous steps successfully, but unwholesome thoughts are still arising.
Since the first step one already does not engage with the thoughts, does not act out of the thoughts, even mentally. So, when one knows how to not act out of greed, aversion and delusion/distractibility, one is already not being hindred.
What I tried to show in my comment was that the instruction to not-remember-not-attention is the first place where one is advised to simply forget the intention to engage with these thoughts, while in the previous steps one still don’t act out of it, but one brings out the context where that intention exists. So, in the first step one tries to include in the broader image signs connected with wholesome so one addresses the mind producing these thoughts; in the second step, when the previous one didn’t worked, one reflect on that intention and the danger of that intention to the mind (because it produce those thoughts), specially because of the fact that attending to the signs connected to the wholesome did not worked, so one tries to bring up the dangers, so the mind affected is discouraged. In the third step, when none of the previous worked, so one just leave the intention be, without acting out of it. Since there is danger, one cannot simply live on with their life as if the mind is not affected. So, one should keep an eye on the mind, without focusing on specific thoughts. Notice that in the previous steps, one still is considering the specific thoughts. Now, one stop focusing on specific thoughts, and focus only in the mind.
And so on. Fourth step one addresses the thought-sankharas, the things that make the thoughts arise, last step one just let the mind kick and scream untill it settles.
I don’t think these are for anyone, only people well advanced in the Path, and one couldn’t choose a specific step instead of going one after the other, where one is still training the mind. Also, this on the level of thoughts, not on the level of the senses.
