22 Feb Do our thoughts think us?
In the last few blogs we looked at the three stages we pass through when meditating. We covered the first stage which involves us identifying less and less with our bodies. We also looked at how we can even start to identify with our possessions. Now we can move on to the second stage in which we identify less and less with our minds.
The author, academic and mystic Eknath Easwaran asks us an interesting question in his book Conquest of the Mind. He asks us “do we think our thoughts or do our thoughts think us?”. Most of us would naturally answer “I think my thoughts!”, but do we? We may decide to try and spend a whole day not thinking a single thought, but thoughts enter our mind anyway. Our mind can bombard us with negative thoughts and we feel powerless to stop it. We may find a song irritating but our minds play the song over and over in our heads driving us mad. We all understand that yelling at a depressed person “just cheer up!” isn’t helpful or useful. It just isn’t that easy or simple.
It is more truthful to say our thoughts think us. Thoughts enter our minds without our control and these same thoughts shape and colour how we see the world and ourselves. Our thoughts think us! When meditating we get used to simply observing the mind. We watch it jumping from thought to thought like a monkey jumping from branch to branch. We start to identify less and less with the mind and more with whatever is observing it. When we focus our attention on a mantra or our breathing our mind wanders off and we drag it back. Our mind seems to have a mind of it’s own!
We then start to see our minds as something we must tame and train for our own good and the good of other people. We take a step back and start examining our thoughts and emotions in a more detached way. Though the practice of meditation we slowly start to conquer our minds which then brings us to the third and final stage of our meditation journey where we start to question our very sense of Self.
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