After years of meditation practice, one
of the most significant changes in my life has been my
relationship to my mind. We�re still living together, of
course, and we remain friends. But my mind and I are no
longer codependent. I am taking back control of myself.
The change in our relationship started when I finally
admitted that my mind had a thinking problem. It was a
heavy thinker, often starting with two or three thoughts
the minute I got up in the morning and then continuing
to think throughout the day until bedtime.
My mind produced thought after thought, about love and
work, of course, along with existential thoughts and
trashy ones, thoughts about clothing food, music,
politics. One subject after another, on and on, and all
of it centered around me, which became embarrassing as
well as oppressive.
The thinking would not let me �be� either at ease,
without worry or in the moment. I began to see my mind
as an insecure, selfish, nagging person who was stealing
my happiness and destroy my life. For our mutual
survival, I decided to seek an intervention.
At first I tried analysis, with hopes of uncovering the
psychological origin of my mind�s need to think; later I
got into some Gestalt screaming, flailing and crying,
which only temporarily stopped the flow of thinking; and
intermittently I used drugs, trying to �blow my mind� by
short-circuiting the neural wiring. Finally, I found
meditation.
It turned out that the goal of meditation was not to
stop thinking, as I had assumed, but rather to expose my
mind to itself. Before meditation I was completed
focused on the content of thoughts, how to manipulate
them and extract meaning from them. That is what I was
graded on in school and what our culture considers
important. But nobody had taught me how to look at the
process of thinking itself or at the intrinsic nature of
thought. As the Tibetan sage Tulku Urgen said,
�The stream of thoughts surges through the mind of an
ordinary person who will have no knowledge whatsoever
about who is thinking where the thought comes from, and
where the thought disappears. The person will be totally
and mindlessly carried away by one thought after
another.�
Let�s be clear: thinking is not bad, or some kind of
roadblock to enlightenment. In fact, thinking is an
essential tool of our well-being and even our survival.
(Perhaps a warning sign should be put up at meditation
centers advising all who enter on the path: �Give up
thinking at your own risk.�)
Indeed, thinking is fabulous. Our genius as a species is
the ability to create complex symbols, agree on their
meaning, and use them to encode our knowledge and
describe our plans. The thinking function allows us to
compute, reason and imagine, and perhaps most important
of all, to share our understanding with each other in
the form of speech or writing. We can even record our
thinking and pass it on to future generations. (�Hold
that thought!�)
Unfortunately, as a species we have grown to value
thinking to the exclusion of other aspects of our being.
The more we become identified with our thoughts, the
more we are lost in our individual narrative,
disconnected from what we have in common with other
humans and other forms of life. We have turned our sense
of self over to our thinking mind, leaving us lost in
thought, disembodied. Especially in Western culture,
heads are us.
Although we remain convinced that our ability to think
somehow makes us the chosen species,� existentially
superior to rest of creation, in the modern era this
belief is being challenged. In his secret notebooks,
Charles Darwin wondered, �Why is thought - which is a
secretation of the brain - deemed to be so much more
wonderful than, say, gravity, which is a property of
matter? It is only our arrogance, our admiration of
ourselves.� Making the same point, Stephen Jay Gould
wondered if an intelligent of octopus would go around
being so proud of its eight arms.
Meanwhile, the new cognitive sciences are putting
thought in its proper place in the scheme of things.
Research into our brain and nervous system reveals that
most of our interpretation of the world as well as our
decision making takes place on what Daniel Dennett calls
the �sub-personal� level, without a rational, conscious,
thinking self directing or guiding the process.
In fact, brain science reveals that thinking comes about
quite late in the cognitive sequence, apparently in
order to weave our experience into the ongoing story we
tell about ourselves. As one neuro-scientist put it, �We
don�t have a rational mind so much as we have a
rationalising mind.� Our thinking is, for the most part,
an afterthought.
Do we overvalue our thinking? The scientists seem to
�think� so. Those who study cognition say it is a way of
organising experience, while the evolutionary scientists
see it as an adaptation, something that evolved like the
eye or the opposable thumb. Great tool, folks, but not
the be-all and end-all of creation.
පුර අටවක
පසෙලාස්වක
අව
අටවක
අමාවක