We as humans will have up to 10,000 thoughts in a day. That amount seems to be pretty much higher but it’s true. How many of these thoughts are serving us and how many are dragging us down? Apparently, the majority of these thoughts are negative and almost all of these thoughts are ones we had the previous day.
Perhaps our question for now is: Why does our mind keep going all over the place and how can we control it?
Sadhguru: Your mind does not go anywhere. It is here and thinking about something else, but still it is here. Neither you nor your body nor your mind go somewhere. They are always one composite whole. If you want to do anything, you have to do something that works for all of them.
You cannot handle each one of them separately. They are always together. It is just that you are being deceived by the imagination of your mind. It is sitting here and imagining something, but you are so identified and lost that you think the mind is going somewhere.
The reason your mind is going on with uncontrollable and endless thought is because you are identified with things that you are not. The moment you get identified with something that you are not, the mind will be non-stop activity.
When you are identified with too many things and you try to stop your mind, you will not succeed no matter how much you try. But if you take away your wrong identifications, you will see that the mind will be just like a mirror – not saying anything, just reflecting everything. That is how the mind should be.
Your mind is a mechanism that works best only when there is clarity in it. Your mind is not here to think up all kinds of fancy things. That is a distraction in life. Your mind is here to give you clarity and penetration into life. But right now the mind is just a huge ball of confusion because you got identified with so many things that you are not, and now you are trying to hold it back. There is no way to hold it back. If you eat very bad food, you will have gas in the stomach. You cannot hold it. It is a consequence of eating bad food.
Once you get identified with too many things that you are not, you cannot stop the mind, no matter what you do. When you sit and try to meditate, you will think of your friend, the cinema, the restaurant and all sorts of things.
Many people will tell you, “Think about God, everything will be okay.” If you think of God, God himself will take you to many places. That is the nature of the mind. You cannot stop it because you have gotten yourself identified with things that you are not.
You are identified with your body, the clothes that you wear, your hairstyle, your wife, your children, your family, your education, your religion – an endless number of identifications.
With all these identities, you want a quiet mind? That is not possible.
The purpose of a spiritual process is not to control your mind but to bring an awareness as to what you are not. Meditation is a process where you create a process of little distance from the mind. Once you disengage from the mind, you disengage from all identity because it is the mind which manufactures identifications.
What is needed is to create a little distance. Once you become meditative, once you create a distance from your mind, things that you have not imagined will happen.
Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Padma Vibhushan”, India’s highest annual civilian award, by the Government of India in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.
-This article is a contribution by Isha Foundation in collaboration with Varnam Malaysia-
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