The Taming of The Mind
A bespectacled middle-aged woman with curly hair and a voice like calm once said to me that our mind is adept at following trains of thought and does a convincing job of making them seem like reality. Remember, they are just thoughts, she told me – figments of the human mind when it’s left to operate on its own.
What went through your head as you read the first sentence of this post? Did you visualize what was described and stopped at the surface, or did you involuntarily trail off into asking who I may be describing (teacher? librarian? Professor Trelawney from Harry Potter?) And once you did, maybe your mind raced off onto another topic (school memories? your hometown library? hogwarts?) And then this and then that.
We hear these slogans all the time – Carpe Diem! YOLO! Live every moment like it’s your last! We observe their saturated use in the media and temporary motivational effect, but what are they borne out of?
I don’t know the full answer, but maybe this will help – watch the first 8 minutes of the video below (forgive the hyperbolic title). You might be positively surprised, like I was, and end up watching the entire 98 minutes. Eckhart Tolle is much better than I in expressing some of these concepts.
“You are bigger than your thoughts. You don’t have to be dominated by your thoughts…Because thoughts create lots of problems too, unnecessary problems. And they can obscure, the aliveness of life at this moment”
Boom.
Before I come off as pretending to be a modern day enlightened form, I will admit that I have not yet fully internalized the realizations and learning summarized above. Thoughts holding sadness, jealousy, self-deprecation, and anger form in my mind from time to time – but the goal is to improve at recognizing them as thoughts and allow them to pass through rather than following them into a spiral. My mind gets distracted by daydreams and memories, but the goal is to practice control over it to be able to voluntarily return to the present moment.
Separation of the mind, body, and consciousness are abstract concepts that I have far from grasped, but maybe one day I will come close. Let’s start the process together, now.
No matter what is going on in your life – the present moment is the only truth. It doesn’t inherently hold any happiness or sadness, but the prize of existence. All else is either a memory, a mental image of what used to be true, or it is a fantasy of what may be true in the future. The only thing that is “real”, is what is now. So absorb the sound of the breeze against the leaves, the sights of beings before you, the sensations they incite in you…carpe diem!
