You are focussing hard and trying to banish thoughts during meditation, and they do not go away. This is the nature of the mind, but it looks like you are prejudiced against your mind. When you are doing your meditation, you don’t mind if your kidneys or your lungs are functioning or if your heart is beating. You don’t mind all the other processes in your body functioning – only your brain should not function!
The notion that if you do something spiritual, your brain should stop working is simply wrong.
What is happening in your liver and kidneys is a lot more complex than the thoughts that you generate. If the activity of your other organs does not disturb you, why do your thoughts disturb you? Because you think you are your thoughts.
The problem is that you are identifying yourself with something that you are not - with your mind. Once you identify yourself with something that you are not - with your mind - you cannot stop the thought process – it will just go on endlessly.
Other creatures have specific goals - they must eat well, grow well, reproduce well, and die one day – everything is set, preprogrammed. Only a human being is wondering, “Why am I here? What is the nature of my life? Where do I come from? Where do I go?”
All these questions only come up when you are human. The difference between a human being and any other creature is that in human beings, the cerebral cortex and other parts of the brain have flowered. You complain about new capability, that has arisen within you, a capability that an ape, a monkey, or any other creature does not have. Do not treat a capability as a problem. But first stop giving the brain bad food – feed it with Truth, not untruth.
We are in the hands of Truth. We don’t have Truth in our hands. We have a complex bunch of lies in our hands. This is the choice – you can make your mind into a comical place or a cosmic space. For it to become a cosmic space, you must keep all the lies down – then Truth will flourish by its own nature. The absence of falsehood is Truth.
Only a fool will talk about what Truth is. One who knows the Truth, will only talk around it, because you cannot talk about it. You can only define and describe that which has some kind of substance, that which has measurable parameters, or boundaries. If something has no boundaries and no parameters, you cannot talk about it. The whole work is about clearing the mess you have created, not about establishing Truth. There is no need to establish Truth. It is in the lap of Truth that all of us exist.
Do not bother about your thoughts or about how to control your thoughts; the brain will do its own thing; you do the meditation – that is all.
(Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev in Oasis column of DH dated 28 Jun 2015)
