Keep in mind when we are talking about all these techniques, we have never said that we are doing them to get rid of certain thoughts, okay. Keep remembering back to the same aspect of unpleasant physical sensations, to change the reaction to them, change reactions to them.
Now imagine you are sitting here in the hall or you are doing the walking meditation and you are fairly concentrated, walking along or whatever, and all of a sudden one of the birds flies under a tree and starts singing very loud very close to you. It's a distraction, being distracted by this loud singing, and if you are practicing correctly in that moment, you are going to note "hearing, hearing" and come back.
Then imagine the bird keeps singing for twenty minutes. Generally we don't note "hearing, hearing" for twenty minutes, but we kind of know it's there. We know the sounds are in the background but we get back to our walking or whatever, yet we generally know it is there, it is in the background. Now a lot of the sounds that you have, and the sounds in particular that we say to note, are only the ones that distract you, pull you away from your object of meditation. If they are not distracting you and yet they are kind of in the background, that's okay, you can leave them back there, they are not really pulling you away.
So you don't have to get rid of every thought either. There is also an aspect of developing more equanimity towards your thoughts. Some of you, if not all of you, have seen that there are certain thoughts that always come back, some very strong stuff, always comes back. If you feed it, it's going to come more. If you don't feed it and you have more equanimity towards it, then it will slowly pass away.
Our thoughts and our conditioning and all of this have certain types of inertia. If you don't know that word it is a basic law. It's called the "Law of Inertia"; that an object in motion tends to stay in motion; and an object that is not in motion tends to stay not in motion. That there is something that must happen to it, before it will change its basic state. So, all of your conditioning has a type of inertia, a type of energy. It's not possible just to stop all of these things, often we have to let their energy die off.
An example I often use is: Consider one afternoon I'm having an interview and a wild dog comes to the little hut. I feel some compassion for it and give it some food. The next day in the afternoon the wild dog comes again. I give it some food. It comes for 3 weeks, I feed it everyday at the same time. Now after three weeks I think to myself, "Well, we do have 2 dogs here already, we really don't want more dogs, maybe I should stop feeding this dog." So it shows up in the afternoon and I don't feed it. Do you think it is going to come tomorrow? After 3 weeks of being fed, sure enough it will come the next day and it may come for three or four days or whatever, because it was conditioned, it had this type of inertia - energy. It was conditioned that if it comes it gets food at that time.
But the longer I don't feed it, eventually it understands, "Oh, that has been turned off, I've got to go somewhere else to get my food." So, a lot of your thoughts are going to work in basically the same way, it's not that we are going to stop all of them really quickly, often we just stop feeding them. Then slowly they die off and as they start to lessen, that is when we can treat them with more equanimity, "That is just the same old thought, same old thought." It doesn't have to be so overpowering if we acknowledge, "I've already noted this one 500 times, I don't have to note it any more. It can stay in the background. "