Myth of the Quiet Mind

There are all kinds of forces that can have an impact on our bodies and on our minds. There are all kinds of things that can impact our relationships with people. But all these things are things of the form.

Once we know the difference

between our essence and our form,

everything can be put into perspective.

There are a lot of religions and spiritual paths that make a big point of saying that, in order for us to become enlightened, the mind must be killed or we have to put a stop to our thoughts. They say that an enlightened being, a being that knows the truth of what is, does not have any thoughts that come to the mind.

But we do have thoughts! We may judge them to be appropriate or not appropriatebut they are there. There are thoughts which come to the mind which we have no control overbut we have them! According to these traditions, the only way to attain enlightenment is to somehow devise a method for the mind to become totally quiet so that it does not get hindered by these things. So we try to do that. And we fail because it is impossible to have thoughts stop coming to the mind.

Thoughts come, stay for a while, and go. New thoughts come. They stay and they go. It has been like that for as long as we can remember. The only way to have thoughts stop coming into our mind is to get a frontal lobotomy, acquire a disease that destroys the brain, or take certain drugs that alter our mind.

Thoughts are going to be coming and going

as long as we are alive and healthy in this form.

Thoughts don’t mean anything.

Thoughts mean something only when we pay attention to them. They mean something only when we let them take over our lives by either focusing solely on them or by believing that “thought” is totally who we are.

But thoughts come and go. Some thoughts make us feel good. Some thoughts are not so pleasant. This is natural. When we try to take all thought away from our minds we get to an unnatural point of not being much different than a vegetable. Then we don’t feel very much. We don’t feel much happiness and we don’t feel much sadness. The question isis that really living?

According to some traditions we can then say to ourselves, “I am enlightened. I don’t feel anything. Everything is just moving by me and I am in a state of total bliss because nothing is affecting me one way or another.” But that’s not the way of being I am talking about.

What I’m talking about is being able to experience the most magnificent things that we can feel and at the same time experience all the things that are not pleasurable. To feel themall of them. To be here. To be present. To be! To know that all these things are happening only to our bodies, to our minds, to our forms. And also to know that the underlying, beautiful, magnificent thing that we are is having a wonderful time with this play! It is all a magnificent playand we need not take everything so seriously, even the spiritual game.

But people don’t like to hear this. They like to hear that we have to do 25 exercises in a precise order. But the truth is that we don’t have to do those things!

We just have to be.

We have to experience our life.

We have to be with what takes place

and remember that part of us which is indestructible

and which is beyond all the puny things

that may be affecting us on a daily basis.

That is who we are. That is what is!