My friend, the monkey mind.
Monkey mind is a Bhuddist concept for the conscious mind, that continuously streaming internal dialogue that never stops and never seems to shut up. It’s restless, ephemeral, always chatting.
Except when we are sleeping, of course, or unconscious. Meditation and hypnosis are two ways to distract the monkey mind to access deeper elements of consciousness.
But the monkey mind has value too. There’s the reason it’s always on, running in the foreground. It is continuously making sense of what’s going on around us, reflecting on what happened in the past, and thinking about what is going to happen in the future. It is restless and easily distracted but also creative and action-oriented. Often when I’m working on big problems, the monkey mind will keep me lying awake in bed, or wake me up in the middle of the night, bursting with ideas that can’t wait until morning, unwilling to let go of them.
When that happens there’s only one thing to do: get up and write them down. That’s what I’m doing right now, in fact. It’s the most reliable way I know of to get the monkey to go back to sleep.
Dave Gray is the founder of XPLANE, the visual thinking company, and author of a new book on creativity and change, Liminal Thinking.
