Stinking Thinking

 

Thinking is more stinking than drinking....

Sufi Sam

Heaviness on the Soul

I woke up, for all kinds of reasons at 4 a.m..  I felt the "stink of think" , I guess.  Mind wanted to go to all kinds of outer world reasons for my waking up but I reduced it all to a "heaviness on my soul" rational. It then  went from a very quick and nonproductive , "What do I do to get rid of this heaviness?"  to a, "Why do I have this heaviness on my soul?"  And I knew, from my understanding of Yoga, it was all to do with mind. My puny personal mind, with all its reactions to what is going on around "me ", and its ingrained desire to do something, anything, to make "me" feel okay inside, was sitting heavily on "my"  soul! It has been in the way of me seeing or experiencing anything else.  It was in the way of Self.

Consciousness Distracted Away from Self by "Me"

The Self...this beautiful spacious mind... perfect consciousness...the one I share with the universe... soul...has been polluted by what Patanjali would refer to as mental modifications: ideas of "me", "my" dislikes and dislikes, this perception  and belief that 'little me' wasn't getting what it wanted from out there,  and the need to fix that. These are the typical problems of the personal mind. The trigger that poked the personal mind and stirred it up (when I almost had it down for a nap)was what is going on around me: situations and others I know I cannot control and fix but that are hovering around the 5 foot 4 bit of space I have been allotted to experience Life through.  This external world that has been surrounding this body and personal mind  I call "me" over the last few days has been very chaotic. So many circumstances, so many behaviours and expressions of pain from others, so many thoughts, so many feelings arising  in reaction to these circumstances....so right there in my face, demanding that I deal with them.  And on top of that  I had the experience of a "hurting heart" and a "troublesome mind" to deal with. Mind was so heavy as it sat there, plopped down on top of my spacious , precious soul. I couldn't see anything else. 

Don't Ask the Mind to Fix What It Has Broken...

So when I awoke in the wee hours of morning I, by  habit,  went right to my mind  and asked, "Why? Why am I so heavy ?"  Mind came up with so many events, circumstances, past and present,  to convince me that  it is all external. With some direction from the deeper part of me, squished beneath the weight, mind  condensed that all up to "You are so heavy because you  never seem to get what you want or need.  Your life is and has been so challenging."  Even the deeper part of me was questioning why there was so many challenging external issues to deal with.  It  asked this crazy, broken, overworked  mind to figure that one out. Mind, doing what it is programmed to do, dug down into its problem solving cupboards and came up with things like, "You are either such a mess inside, you are projecting a mess out there;  or it must be your karma debt or something that you are paying off. There has to be some reason why you are where you are in terms of circumstance etc" 

Meditate Instead.

 Mind was doing its best to answer and I  wanted, again by habit, to follow mind along that path but instead I sat up ( at what is believed to be the best time to meditate (between 4-7 am) ). I meditated. Instead of giving my overworked mind more "problems" to solve, more questions to answer (when really it is not capable of answering anything in a wholesome way)...I decided to focus on something other than "what mind was doing in reaction to my challenging and problematic life. " I brought my attention to  breath and to the sound of waking  robin song out there.  The mind was still heavy and demanding, weighing down on my soul, and attempting to pull me away in the habitual way it does with all the reasons from "out there" that were leading to this heaviness.  I had to keep reminding myself..."just thinking...just thought" and once I caught myself following my broken personal mind along these stories and thought streams, I brought myself back to breath and the lovely music that was getting louder and louder outside my window.  My mantra was, "I can relax into this until it passes through. I can relax into this until it passes through." 

More Stinking than Drinking

I relaxed and  eventually "the disturbance" did pass through me and out of me through the tears I cried and the conscious breaths I breathed out. I meditated maybe for forty minutes or an hour, and throughout it all I went back and forth from the personal mind to the universal mind.  I would be focusing on something far greater than "my problematic me" mental modification. Then I would slip into thought streams and get carried away.  I would wake up in these streams of story and narrative, and I would crawl out,  focusing again on my breath and the robin song....until I slipped again.  The process involved a lot of slipping back into the personal mind and a lot of crawling out into the universal one. 

Bring Your Attention to What is Underneath 

It is all about where we put our attention, right? When I first woke up my attention was on my personal mind, this "little me" and its likes and dislikes, the heaviness that sat on my soul blocking the natural flow of peace, joy, love and bliss. As long as I was focusing on this heaviness, I couldn't see anything else. Consciousness tends to focus on that which is the noisiest...the squeaky wheel. There is nothing noisier, Singer reminds us, than ego with its  hurting heart and  disturbed mind.  That is why it is constantly getting our attention, pulling us away from peace which naturally exists below these mental modifications.  When we focus on ego, consciousness does not see itself there beneath it.  The focus becomes so narrow, so constricted and our life 'experience' becomes the same.  As long as I was focusing on the blob of ego trouble that was sitting on top of  Self, I couldn't see or experience anything beyond ego's heart and mind. This heaviness just sat right there in the middle of my consciousness blocking the view of the spaciousness  that is always there beneath it all. I needed to take my attention of it.

I knew better than to try to stop the mind, beat it off or reprimand it for doing what I asked it to do. I just knew that focusing on it was the problem and removing my attention from it was the answer. Once we remove attention from it...we free souls so the natural flow of who we really are can emerge. We purify the mind, by removing our attention from the veil of personal mind, to get to the purity of Self. 

Hmm! 

All is well in my world. 

The purified mind is no different than the Self.

Rama Krishna

Michael A. Singer ( July 23, 2023) Going Beyond the Distraction of the Ego Mind. https://tou.org/talks/