Clearing the Mind
From The New Three-Minute
Meditator
by David Hart
Minds are just chock full of thoughts. You may sometimes be able to concentrate so intensely on a specific task that no distracting thoughts interfere for a while. But soon enough, a moment of restlessness or doubt or desire or fear creeps in. And, thoughts being what they are, when you mind isn't strongly focused — when you're driving, eating, or just relaxing by yourself — your mind may jump from one thought to another, like the a proverbial "drunken monkey" who leaps aimlessly from branch to branch.
Most of the time, our mental attention is directed outward, to other people, to the outside world. Our mind is full of thoughts and plans for the future or analysis of the past. We constantly make judgments about everything that passes into our mental field of view: I like this person, dislike that one, she is beautiful, he is a jerk. Some thoughts may last a lifetime, as when we spend years being obsessed by some strong desire or beating ourselves endlessly with the same seemingly "unmanageable" fears.
Watching the Mind
When a thought enters your mind, do you feel obligated to pay attention to it? Perhaps you can simply brush some thoughts aside. Other thoughts, especially fears and desires, seem to expand to fill your entire awareness, although you may consciously want to be rid of them. Often, it seems as though you have little control over your thoughts, especially when an unpleasant image or unacceptable desire occurs again and again, despite your conscious need to get rid of it. Instead of only paying attention to the specific content of each thought, we will begin to see the process by which the thoughts arise and pass away.
As we better understand this process through watching the mind, we will become able to choose how to deal with each thought that arises. We will pay attention to the ones we want to pay attention to, and gently withdraw attention from those we don't want to pay attention to. Eventually, we will be controlling our thoughts rather than being controlled by them.
And our thoughts will control us if we allow them to. As Epictetus said more than two thousand years ago, "Men are not worried by things that happen, but by their thoughts about those things".
No one can control the things that happen in the world. We are at the mercy bios, the accident, the natural disaster, the aging process. But we can control our mental reactions to whatever happens, if we just learn to understand how our own thought processes work.
