Many people meditate for the well-studied benefits, such as heightened concentration and reduced stress and anxiety. And these are excellent reasons to practice. But meditation also offers a deeper insight into the true essence of the mind itself.
Our default mental experience is incessant and instant identification with what we think. We immediately believe that the thoughts arising in our minds are true and representative of who we are. For example, I may have the following thought: “My presentation tomorrow is going to be awful. I’m so unprepared.” The customary response to having this thought is to accept it without protest. In this case, what is likely to follow after accepting the thought is an associated emotion, like anxiety, along with its physiological symptoms, such as an increased heartbeat or sweating. Noticing these uncomfortable symptoms and interpreting them to be signs of my nervousness for tomorrow’s presentation leads to more thoughts: “I'm so nervous. This isn't going to go well. I'd rather not go to class tomorrow.” Accepting the negative thought to be true, I have effectively become the thought. This leads to a spiral of negative emotion, uncomfortable physical symptoms, and more destructive thoughts.
A healthier relationship with the mind is one in which the original thought is brought into question. “My presentation tomorrow is going to be awful.” Do I know this to be true? Of course not, because the event takes place in the future, which has not yet occurred. Is the thought helpful? Probably not. I may be motivated to prepare more for a presentation because of this thought, but it’s also likely that it leads to the downward spiral detailed above. If I could let go of the thought that my presentation “is going to be awful,” I could still recognize that I’m unprepared, and then prepare for it.
So, why do we accept what we think as truth? It stems from the conviction that we are the originators of our thoughts. We intuitively feel like each thought we have results from a conscious, deliberate process in response to the circumstances we find ourselves in.
Through meditation, however, we are able to perceive with greater clarity that this is not actually the case. During a meditation session focused on the breath, we notice that thoughts emerge seemingly out of nowhere. If we try to abstain from thinking for even a brief period, we quickly discover our inability to do so.
Thus, there exists a dissonance between our intuition (that we are the architects of our thoughts) and our experiences during meditation (that we cannot abstain from thinking for a mere five minutes).
To resolve this dissonance, we need to pierce through the illusion that we are the creators of our thoughts and acknowledge that, rather, thoughts arise spontaneously and independently. This realization offers a level of freedom, as it creates a distance between our self and our mind. Consequently, our mind transforms from being synonymous with our sense of self to a valuable tool for planning and problem-solving. We no longer need to accept our thoughts as absolute truth, nor do we need to base our entire identity on them. Realizing this, we acquire greater flexibility in responding to thoughts, listening to them when they are useful, and dispelling them with conscious awareness when they are not.
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