Oakville Zen Meditation
#1 Human condition
Our #1 human condition: being lost in our non-stop compulsory thinking.
We are thinking zombies: estimation 80 to 120,000 thoughts/ 24/7 from FMRI.
Most of us spend our entire life imprisoned within the net of our own thoughts.
They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by their past experience. Each thought pretends to be important.
Thoughts want you to draw your attention towards them completely, and all the time.
It is very easy to be trapped in our mental conceptual prisons generated by
viewpoints, beliefs, opinions, labeling, dogmas, past, and future.
Such prisons give us a sense of security and a false sense of “ I know”, most often ego-driven.
In its desire to control us, our thoughts, again mostly ego-driven are mistaking their viewpoints for the authentic truth, therefore, dragging us into wrong interpretations, delusions, illusions, ignorances, and mistakes.
The opposite of our conditioned and conceptual mind is called: “open mind”, “no mind”, “beginner mind”, or “ free mind” in Zen literature.
Don’t take me wrong. Thinking is a fundamental mental function critical to functioning and interacting as a human being. Without it, we will be reduced to a veggie level.
In all of us, there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than the
thinking consciousness. One may call it “thoughtless “consciousness”.
It is the very essence of who we are. Finding that dimension frees us from
our conceptual mind and the negativities that we are inflicting on ourselves and others when the mind-made ego-driven “little me” is all we know that could run our life.
If you recognize that your thoughts are just that, sort of permanent mental noise,
and you can witness your own mental emotional reactive patterns as they happen,
then this “thoughtless consciousness” will always emerge as pure, silent, still, non-analytic, and nonemotional. It is called pure awareness.
This is exactly what we do while meditating.
What is our basic delusion? Identifying ourselves with our thoughts and their factual
worlds.
Spiritual awakening is awakening from our overthinking-made prison
Whenever you are immersed in your compulsive conceptual thinking, you may be drifted
away from genuine factual realities.
Final words:
nonanalytic, nonjudgmental, non-decisional, and nonemotional….like a mirror reflecting things as they are. You will realize that the observer Is, in fact, the genuine self, and, therefore, that the thinker is not what you are.
Their thinking is factual but its products that are thoughts are fictional.
listening to a zillion of Dharma talks by the best teachers because serenity, equanimity, wisdom, and eventually Awakening are based on the practice of pure awareness using an open, defrosted and receptive mind to observe the genuine and factual reality of the moment rather than the mind-made fictional one.
Thank you
