Has it ever happened to you that you sat in meditation, thinking today I won't think a thought, and the next moment you came back to awareness, already minutes had passed, you were already gone for a long time?
Who is your biggest enemy? The mind. No one can harm you more than your own mind untamed. And who is your best friend? The mind. No one can help you more than your own mind, wisely trained. —Buddha
When we start digging deeper, we watch the monkey mind. Always rolling in the past or the future. The moment one thought has not even ended when another has already started.
It becomes an enemy of itself because it is lost and stuck in this maze of ignorance because Neither the past exists, Nor the Future.
It forgets to live in the present moment.
But can it be trained and tamed?
Either we train it to serve us, or, by worshiping it, we end up serving it.
When we become too devoted to the dictates of our rational mind, we live in ignorance of our higher, intuitive faculties.
Under the direction of our higher consciousness, our rational mind when trained helps us in accomplishing great things that benefit us and our world.
The mind makes an amazing servant but a poor master.
What do we mean by 'Mind' here?
Here we are talking about the Thinking Mind. Rene Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am"
No other phrase clearly defines the fall in the level of our consciousness as we totally became identifies with our thinking minds.
We lost our faculty to even see what lies beyond our thoughts and in today's world, most humans live that way.
We did not forget our true nature, but we even forgot what we forgot.
When we identify with being a separate identity, the egoic mind becomes our greatest enemy because at its core is the idea of separation from the whole or All. It lives in a state of despair as it seeks its wholeness but since it is inherently separate, there is no way for it to find it.
Thus, the mind wants one thing, when finding it, is still not fulfilled and then catches another to fill itself.
It wants to be back at its origin but it does not know how to do it. So it seeks outside of itself for this validation forgetting that inside is where the wholeness can be found.
It creates, labels, stories, opinions, right and wrongdoings, judgments, and anything which makes the ego bigger. It sees through its judgment and division and endless thinking. So, It has an answer for everything.
It tries to hold incessantly.
Either this or that.
It says I am better than this person or I am worse.
I am good, or I am bad.
And it lives through these ideas. Always in a state of insecurity. It not only judges itself, but it judges others as well,
They are better or they are worse.
They are good or bad.
Essentially, it is trapped in a hell of its own making. I do believe that when Jesus was speaking of the devil, he was referring to the egoic mind and that which identifies as something separate from the whole.
If you sit in the space where you can objectively what your thoughts, You'll see how far your madness has reached.
If you want to see the Truth of who you are, then you'll have to see beyond the mind.
Not by trying to get rid of it, but by not being controlled by it and just simply letting it come and go. When you don't give it enough power and when you don't identify it. It itself will lose its power to you and that's where you become the master of it.
You have to see through the mind so you can live in a space where you no longer cling to thoughts and take them so seriously. You reach a point where the mind has softened so much (through its seeing of itself) that it no longer has its hooks in and causes such suffering and misery. You are not the mind. But you must see that and meditation and self-inquiry are the way out of the enemy of the mind and back to the limitless wholeness and peace, which is Home. Drop the mind and feel the freedom underneath. Let go of thinking and you find peace.
One thing will become clear as you keep digging deeper that, it is all in the mind and we keep walking all around it in absence of our inner knowing and wisdom and so that is known as ignorance.
Aren't we all ignorant of the situation within us? Just that the degrees may differ.
All we can do is slowly keep on reducing this ignorance within us, not as an act of taking control, but with love and surrender.
The more ignorant we are, our mind is making the worst enemy in us.
More we reduce ignorance we keep making mind our friend.
Try to ask yourself,
Is my mind ruling my Life or
Am I in control of my mind?
The answer will not come with direct reference but when we keep working on ourselves, slowly things start becoming clearer and clearer as the mud in the pond settles.
We should know for improving we always have to get out of our comfort zone and thus need to identify and accept it first.
One step at a time. One moment at a time. One day at a time.
Now we have discussed this, so it's time to move further.
How can we be mindful of the mind within the mind?
Just as the river flows, our bodily sensations just are passing through consciousness, hundreds of emotions passing through us, there’s also a river of thoughts.
If you try to sit silently for a minute, Do you see what happens?
Does your mind become quiet and stay 'quiet'!?
Nope! It doesn't understand that command. So, you end up making giving it more food for thought when you are 'trying' to make it still.
Scientists say that we have an average of about 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day.
Do you think it is possible for us to control all of them? Don't even try.
As the heartbeats, If you have been able to observe your thoughts in your meditation, you must have seen,
Thoughts happen!
The river of thoughts is not under your control. And these thoughts have very little authenticity. They can be literally anything, any story, any belief, or any question. Much of the river is composed of reruns. It's like when you are unable to sleep at night so you get us to work but you are not only getting the thoughts of sleep. It reruns of your last love affair, last sexual act, or of a conversation you had at work, or anxiety and shame about some problem, or anger at being treated poorly by someone in your distant past. & no matter what you want to do with it, you have trouble changing the flow. The whole parade just keeps repeating and repeating without resolution. It can be really crazy in there—have you noticed? Such conditioned madness.
One morning you are sitting on your balcony and your thoughts arise full of fear and anxiety? You are mindful of your thoughts for a moment and you come to realize that much of what you believe is the product of your imagination.
Thoughts can be misleading in many ways. Thoughts of high praise, thoughts of criticism, thoughts of falling in love, thoughts of jealousy and hatred. Voices of your parents, internalized like monologues, sometimes appearing as the inner judge and the inner tyrant. Then there are the voices of the unloved child or the ambitious achiever, voices who are always trying to fix or deceive us.
There are healthy voices, wise voices, and loving voices, too. But most of the time your thoughts are like a bureaucracy that continues to perpetuate itself even when the need for it has been outgrown, even when it’s actually become unpleasant and restrictive and possibly dangerous to you.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”
So what can you do?
With mindfulness, you can stop taking them so seriously.
You can step back to the place of a silent witness, An observer,
and listen to your thoughts mindfully and then make a choice whether they’re useful or not, which space are they coming from, what are they pointing towards.
Yeah! It’s true that we all need rational thoughts to solve problems, but are they all useful?
When you are mindful, aware, you realize, most of your thoughts are rather stopping you from actually solving the problems.
They are the barriers.
You could probably eliminate 90 percent of your thoughts and still have plenty to do the job.
So the first thing you can do is to listen to your thoughts with mindful awareness.
You will see the impermanent nature of thoughts, that they are fleeting ideas, all impermanent. And then you can begin to realize that just because you have a thought doesn’t mean you have to believe it—much less act on it—and certainly not get caught up in the whole stream of them. You can release the mind of some of its more dangerous patterns. Observing the mind with mindfulness brings liberation.
After you have reached a Nursery Level from the kindergarten level, learn to see what’s in your mind and learn to release or disidentify with the unhealthy patterns, you discover a deeper level of liberation.
When you rest in the present moment with mindfulness, you open to a presence that is timeless, eternal, and changeless. Beyond the understanding of thought.
It’s by returning to the awareness beyond thoughts that you experience liberation. When your mind and heart open, you realize who you are, the timeless, limitless awareness behind all thought.
Remembering who you really are, you see with the heart. you experience with your whole being. The Impermanence of Thoughts arising and passing away.
You see everything, with lesser judgments, lesser labels, lesser unnecessary thoughts but AS IT IS.
Nisargadatta Maharaj said "the mind creates the right and wrong, of worries and fears that lead us away from this timeless presence. The only power that can cross this abyss is the awakened heart. Even in difficulty, the awakened heart rests in love."
This is one example and we can interpret this difference in many ways when we are making our mind our biggest enemy.
If you are not the mind, what difference does it make if it is quiet or empty?
The more we do not get involved with it, it simply calms down on its own.
It may take years for few, weeks for some because time is a constrict for this dimension, but when we are persistent enough, to just leave the mind as it is. It slows down eventually.
For making mind our friend, We have to come to that space for Awareness and hold it one step at a time until we are no longer controlled by the Mind, and the reverse starts happening.
Let's explore a bit about the mind,
The mind is an amazing tool or gift given to us to dissect things into recognizable forms so that the world and concepts become simpler and more comprehensive. But in life, we realize that we cannot seek everything out with our rational logical mind because the reasons do not come very clearly to us. Some concepts don't have a logical explanation. This makes mind our worst enemy because it doesn't let us accept few things which do exist but might not be put into a simple logical framework.
The mind stores a lot of things that stop us from going beyond those things. The whole point of Accepting things was not to store them in the mind and lock it inside some cage but to dissolve it. Our mind keeps us away from dissolving the energy which was meant to be moving, but it is not stuck. The moment we see something that has a past association in our mind with a painful experience, we doom ourselves into it yet again.
The mind gives us endless opportunities to experience and add perspectives to our lives. But it's that same mind that makes those perspectives "My perspectives" and it also at times runs its own world within this world which keeps us away from reality for long. For instance, the mind creates certain thoughts based on past experiences so effectively that we tend to believe that this is how actually things are. But it is not so. We tend to hold on to those stories and patterns and then anything that happens, rather than seeing that thing as it is, we color it with the past experience and patterns.
There is nothing in the mind that is of its own. Everything is like a movie we experienced or maybe just read, heard, or sensed somewhere. So, the mind keeps us in the circumlocution of the same things we knew and doesn't allow us easily to move forward and accept the change.
Although, The control on the thoughts our mind produces, if mastered, can be the greatest blessing too!
AWARENESS is the key!
Can for a moment you just witness your thoughts, without getting involved in them?
It just feels that way. You know all about yourself. You know all your own weaknesses, even though you try to hide them even from yourself.
When you try to pretend everything is going great, your mind knows better. If you try to make everything work out perfectly, your mind will often sabotage you.
Your mind will tell you both the things altogether,
Example,
Why you need something?
and Why you cannot have it?
So the mind literally enjoys this constant battle within, because it is feeding on to it and winning all the time.
The moment you start becoming the master of your Mind, It'll fight back even harder!
So what do we do?
We simply continue our work. Patiently, but persistently.
You are not your Mind. The Mind is a part of you. A beautiful tool given to each one of us to enhance the experience of Life.
Let the presence in you linger longer and longer until you INTEGRATE everything in it.
This is neuroplasticity or maybe we can call it "mind training".
Who is your biggest enemy? The mind. No one can harm you more than your own mind untamed. And who is your best friend? The mind. No one can help you more than your own mind, wisely trained. —Buddha
THE MIND WHICH IS TRAINED WELL CAN BE ONE OF YOUR GREATEST ASSET, TOOL, FRIEND AND JEWEL.
