Oakville Zen Meditation
Becoming a Mind watcher
Beside controlling our body and using its cognitive skills, our mind is a fantastic movie maker, producing around 90,000 films every days made of thoughts and emotions in different space-times, various scenarios and actor. We are inside the screen, trapped in this mind-made ongoing fictional worlds. Enough to become almost insane for many.
However we can get rid of almost all this mental insanity hidden in your preconscious mind where past and future are the dominant playgrounds.
Just by being a
simple witness of your ongoing thought & emotions should do the trick.
How to do it? It requires practice.
Simply sit silently, watch and witness your thoughts/emotions passing before
you. Just witnessing, not interfering that is not analyzing and not judging,
because the moment you enter in a cognitive element, you have lost your status
of being the pure witness. Like in Court, the witness does not judge.
The moment your inner
voice says “this is good, this is bad,
why, how, when, where, whom”, I want, I don’t want you have already jumped
onto the cognitive and emotional slippery slope, like being a hamster in its
wheel.
It takes daily practice to create a gap between the thinker i.e. the victim of
the mind tricks instead of being the
witness of the tricks.
Once the gap is
there, you are in for a great surprise: you are not driven anymore by your mind,
you are the witness, a watcher of it.
And this process of watching your usual ruler (mind) becomes is the magic of
real spirituality.
As you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start to shrink, even evaporate, at least temporarily.
At this point your mind becomes still and silent. This is one of the characteristics of an
“Empty mind” as Zen calls it.
In fact, learning to
watch the stampede of our thoughts while focusing on our breathing or on any other
focusing targets is the primary goal of mindfulness meditation.
At this moment and, unfortunately, for a short duration, you are experiencing
enlightenment or better said awakening.
This is the moment we become, for the first time, a free human being, liberated from
our inner prison called mind.
Thank you
August
