YOUR MIND IS YOUR REAL PROBLEM
மனம் ஒரு குரங்கு!
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. About 80 to 90% of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction.
You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The involuntary thought processes, continuous monologues or dialogues comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. It is not necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this is accompanied by soundtrack, visual images or mental movies. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease…
You are not your mind. Don’t identify you with your mind. It creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationships. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. You are unconsciously identified with your mind, so you don’t even know that you are its slave. Can you be free of your mind whenever you want to? Have you found the “off” button? The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation.
You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker”, which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence – your deeper self – behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind thought identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream - a gap of “no-mind”. At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. This is the beginning of your natural state of felt oneness with Being, which is usually obscured by the mind. With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will deepen. In fact, there is no end to its depth. You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of being...
You feel your own presence with such intensity and such joy that all thinking, all emotions, your physical body, as well as the whole external world become relatively insignificant in comparison to it….
Instead of watching the thinker you can do meditation to draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. Meditation leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without , but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an incredible liberation this is!
This post mostly contains extracts from the book “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle, the Enlightened Spiritual Teacher who now lives in British Columbia. For detailed and further steps towards Enlightenment please refer to that great book of one of the present day Gnanis.
-- in the path of Guruji,
raviyolimathi...
