Day Nine: Who Can Stop the Mind?

Those who take up the practice of meditation inevitably come to the question: how can I stop my mind? When we sit to meditate and turn our attention within, we are surprised to discover how active our minds really are—waves of thoughts flow endlessly, jumping from one association to the next in fantastic leaps like waves on a stormy sea. The challenge is not so much the endless nature of thought activity but that our attention and awareness follows those thoughts, gets involved with them, and then we become distracted from our intended focus. What to do about this perennial problem? The answer is counterintuitive but simple.

Instead of trying to suppress or stop the thinking process, we ignore it. As a meditator you’ve probably already noticed that the more energy you put into trying to stop your thoughts, the more thoughts are produced. Thus, the sages discovered the best method for quieting the mind is to use the mind in a different way. Rather than trying to stop our thoughts, we use the power of the mind to concentrate on a single thing. This single thing can be something as simple and as readily available as the breath, or a mantra. When the mind is employed to concentrate on one thing, the restless activity of random thought subsides by itself. We don’t try to suppress or stop thought activity, we simply redirect our attention and hold it there. Concentration on a single point is the key. Concentration is the key but it is not the goal. Meditation, and more precisely, the direct experience of the Self that superconscious meditation can provide, is the goal.

Once we become proficient at concentration, we can observe how thoughts settle and the mental field becomes clear. Then we let go of the tool of concentration and enter into meditation by allowing our awareness to expand within. We may initially attend to a more subtle focus of attention such as inner sound, energy, or light as the mental field continues to be clarified, but ultimately, our awareness expands to rest in pure existence-being, beyond any thought or even a subtle object of perception.

We don’t stop the mind in meditation; our awareness expands beyond it, into the infinite field of superconsciousness.

Think About It: In meditators alpha [brain wave activity] remains present, and non-reactive regardless of external stimuli. In essence the reactive pathways in the brain are quieted and the sense, or location of influence, shifts from an outer to an inner cause. This shift correlates with improvement in the immune systems function and greater regulation in both under and over acting immune problems.
—Martin Wuttke

Be inspired: You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty superior to reason, by entering into a state in which you are your finite self no longer—in which the divine essence is communicated to you. It is the liberation of your mind from its finite consciousness. —Plotinus