Habit is trained willpower. We make up our minds and then with persistence, achieve our goals. The power of autosuggestion and action paves the way.
But if you want to know yourself — who you really are, beyond the bling of your latest distraction…you have to get off the road and jump into the deep blue waters of your wild mind.
Where the rules are different.
For starters, there is no road to pave. No signposts and traffic lights and Google pins to follow. You are swimming in a sea of open uncertainty.
Have you tried to watch your mind recently?
Close your eyes and wait for the next thought. It will come. Just wait for it. Before you know it you have been washed away in thought. You just got swept away or bashed in the face by some memory or some future event. By the time you recover from that one and wonder what just happened, bam! The next wave of thought just crushed you into its spell…
We spend all our day trying to distract ourselves with willpower and habits and routines and actions that override that undercurrent of the wild mind.
But once in a while we must open that latch to the basement of the wild mind and sit in that darkness. Just to meet and get to know our subconscious self.
That is the source of the real opportunity or the problem. See this basement as living with the roots of the plants above. We spend so much time metaphorically speaking cutting the grass, pruning the bushes, and tending to the vegetables of our daily lives that we forget that the roots lie below the surface. If you want to change the garden of your life, you have to lie with the roots. You have to get comfortable gazing into your darkness.
Try it sometimes, close your eyes and gaze at the darkness of your mind. It is not a dull boring place. It shimmers with light and energy. It has images and shapes and even color sometimes. It is the first encounter with a side of you that you hardly pay any attention to. It’s like your breathing. When was the last time you paid attention to your breath? I mean have you heard yourself breathing recently? Just stop reading and try it. Listen to your breath.
Did you notice something that just happened? In listening to your breath your mind fell silent. It paused. It stopped bursting with ideas and intentions and desires and images. It just felt silent for a moment.
Mind watching reveals a lot about us as we are. Not what we are or what we do. It reveals who we are. Under the hood of our habits.
I have a lot of respect for action and habits and perseverance. But if that is not complemented with deep contemplation we risk losing touch with our sacred selves. Our spirit self. It is a deeper and wilder side of our being that is harder to understand and even harder to control.
Mind watching helps you separate yourself from your actions. It raises you higher than your human self. Osho speaks about this separation well when he says,
“The watcher is separate from the mind, it is deeper than the mind, higher than the mind. The watcher is always hidden behind the mind. A thought passes, a feeling arises — who is watching this thought? Not the mind itself — because mind is nothing but the process of thought and feeling. The mind is just the traffic of thinking. Who is watching it? When you say, “An angry thought has arisen in me,” who are ‘you’? In whom has the thought arisen? Who is the container? The thought is the content — who is the container?”
Watching the mind leads to two reactions. You either cooperate or resist.
A positive thought arises about something someone said about you and you want to cradle it and caress it and coax it to continue. Then suddenly a harsh critic thought shouts an abuse as it passes on a white horse…and you try to resist it and look away. If you cooperate or resist your thoughts you are just reinforcing your mind. You are accepting you are at the mercy of the mind. You are giving it power. You are accepting that you are- because you think.
Instead of powering your mind, do something else. Just watch. What if you just watch these thoughts as they rise and fall. That is how thoughts move in the mind anyway. They bubble up from somewhere and then they dissolve back from where they arose. The source remains a mystery.
As you keep watching your thoughts you will notice small gaps between these thoughts. Intervals of silence. A small crack of calm.
Feel that space. It is full of peace and calm. This peace is also a piece of you. Maybe the real you. Maybe the universal you that feels unconditionally in love with everything in the universe. Osho again reflects on this well,
“Just watch. Just be a witness. And, by and by, you will see gaps arising. A thought passes, and another thought does not come immediately — there is an interval. In that interval is peace. In that interval is love. In that interval is all that you have always been seeking — and finding never.”
In that space your ego falls silent, It stops worrying about itself. It stops asking for gratification or attention. The ego rests. In that tiny space, you feel your completeness. You feel self-love. You find the source of your joy. You notice, get a glimpse of the island of peace that you can go to. It’s like the oystercatcher who comes up for air before diving back to hunt.
The more you seek this interval the longer it lasts. The space of calm is your sanctuary. It is your holy crevice in the mountain of your life. You don’t need to go on a pilgrimage to find it. It is right here inside you. Waiting for you to access it.
There is a deeper layer of bliss beyond the intervals. It is the detachment from these gaps.
This is a state of detached alertness. It is when a Yogi can feel alive without a shred of attachment to the mind. This is what Osho refers to as the Tremendous Emptiness. In his words,
“So the first thing is to become an indifferent watcher. And the second thing is to remember that when beautiful gaps arise, don’t get attached to them, don’t start asking for them, don’t start waiting that they should happen more often. If you can remember these two things — when beautiful gaps come, watch them too, and keep your indifference alive — then one day the traffic simply disappears with the road, they both disappear. And there is tremendous emptiness.”
All yogis have felt a touch of this tremendous emptiness for a fleeting moment in their lives. Either while in meditation or when under the influence of a psychedelic. But then the mind comes back online. But just that fleeting fragrance is enough to convince a seeker to stay on the path and keep watching his mind. Daily, diligently and with endless hope.
So mind watching is not mind training. It requires no extra effort.
It’s like breathing. It is allowing the mind to have its own way. All we have to do is to watch it. Watch it like an AI camera watches a crowd. Intently but indifferently. The more the mind is watched and not heard, slowly and then suddenly it turns silent. It leaves you alone.
Then in that state, you become free — of your mind. The ultimate kind of freedom.
This freedom of aloneness is what Osho refers to as “an aloneness where nothing is excluded. In that aloneness everything is included — that aloneness is God. That purity, that innocence, uncorrupted by any thought, is what God is.”
This self reality can be experienced if we watch our minds.
That is why it’s a big deal.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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The post Mind Watching: What’s the Big Deal? appeared first on The Good Men Project.
