Harnessing Control of our Thoughts
Who exactly is doing the thinking in our brains?
I have been quite fascinated with where our thoughts come from lately. Why do we get lost in rabbit holes of worry, anxiety, reminiscing (about good or painful things), and the constant chewing of our minds?
I remember hearing a Shaolin master once say that the most important thing we must do is control our minds. I thought this sounded like a very harsh and unfair thing to ask. Logically, this strong push-back doesn’t really make any sense. Why wouldn’t we want to have control over our minds? Why wouldn’t I think, “Oh yes, I’ll start working on that”?
It’s a funny thing.
No Mind & No Thoughts
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk about Verse 71 in The Radiance Sutras (a beautiful book by Lorin Roche, and a translation and interpretation of the tantric text “Vijnana Bhairava Tantra).
Within this talk, we are asked to imagine that we have no mind and no thoughts. What are we left with?
We realize that most of our thoughts are actually vikalpas, Sanskrit for “thought constructs” and that these thought constructs all exist in the past or the future. These thoughts that we are having are not in this present moment at all, and because the past and the…
