Mind, Misery and Buddha
Doing nothing is not easy. If you've ever tried meditation, you know how hard it is to quiet your mind or control your thoughts. The more you try to control your thoughts, the more they dominate you.
Thought is like a Knife
Thought is a great tool. But it is also the root of misery according to Buddhist and Hindu monks. You are sad and depressed when you have sad and depressing thoughts. You can feel depressed about things that haven’t even happened yet because you have thoughts about the future and you can suffer things that have happened years ago that may have nothing to do with your current life situation. So yeah, thought is like a knife: it’s very useful but if you’re not careful you can cut yourself.
BUT THE REAL PROBLEM IS…
You Are Not In Control
Now if you are trying to control your mind that makes one thing clear: you are not the mind, you’re the one trying to control the mind (and failing).
All the complex processes that are happening in your body like digestion, blood circulation, etc. take place without your conscious involvement but so do your thought processes, they are happening on their own. You know what this means: You are not in control!
In Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit, he writes that once you form a habit it becomes automatic and the action is delegated to the part of the brain called Basal Ganglia. Then you don’t have to consciously pay attention to the action of your habit, it just kind of happens on its own (but is actually performed by the basal ganglia) and so your brain becomes free for daydreaming or thinking other useless thoughts that are going to torment you.
Using the Knife with Steady Hands
The solution should be pretty apparent by now. If you want to control the nature of your experience you must become capable of controlling your thoughts. But the thing is: it’s not that easy damn it! whenever you sit down and try to control your thoughts, your thoughts go even more rampant. That’s the reason we respect the monks and yogis who are able to meditate for hours on end and they have complete control over their mind!
Buddha’s Technique
Buddha’s solution for gaining complete control over your mind and the nature of your experience is a technique he invented called Vipassana. Now it’s hard to summarize the whole technique in this short blogpost so I took help from Osho (another spiritual teacher). Here’s his definition of Vipassana:
Vipassana can be done in three ways ¯ you can choose which one suits you the best. The first is: Awareness of your actions, your body, your mind, your heart. Walking, you should walk with awareness. Moving your hand, you should move with awareness, knowing perfectly that you are moving the hand. You can move it without any consciousness, like a mechanical thing. You are on a morning walk; you can go on walking without being aware of your feet. Be alert of the movements of your body. While eating, be alert of the movements that are needed for eating. Taking a shower, be alert of the coolness that is coming to you, the water falling on you and the tremendous joy of it…. Just be alert. It should not go on happening in an unconscious state.
Osho
