When you start out in meditation, at first you can’t tell the difference between your mind and you. This is the starting point for most people, and the truth is, it causes a great deal of misery. When you first hear about the possibility of stepping outside of that way of seeing yourself, it sounds like cheating. A lot of people have this reaction to meditation and mindfulness practices. They might ask how it can be that not listening to your mind is fruitful. But it is not really about not listening to your mind. In good practice, we listen to the mind fully. But we also refuse to take it too seriously. Why?
The mind is not quite as concerned with truth as we take it to be. The more you watch what it does, the clearer it becomes that all the mind is looking to do is create distinctions. It sets up boundaries, makes a big deal out of this versus that. Evolutionarily, this makes complete sense. The rational mind is what allows us, as hunter-gatherers, to continue to live. The problem is that it seems to have outlived its purpose. Culture moves at a much quicker pace than evolution, and the starkest evidence of that is that our minds are going insane. Even the sanest people out there are suffering from an inherent madness. The same function of consciousness which brought about the ability to make fire, carve out tools from wood and the like, is now moving at a hundred million miles an hour, trying desperately to make sense of the modern world. You have heard it being called information overload, but even that is an understatement.
The thinking mind is now a kind of disease, albeit one prevalent enough that we can’t see it most of the time. Thinking has become a disease, a compulsion which does not actually serve us as well as we would like to imagine. The way out, of course, is not to suppress it, but simply to be aware of it. In being aware of it, you have to accept that you are more than it. To be aware of something, you have to be beyond it. This is the first lesson, and the most important one.
It may be that one day we will evolve beyond the rational mind. When that happens, all of its ghosts will depart from the world too. It’s hard to imagine what exactly that would look like, but it seems likely that there will be no atomic bombs.
literary stories 