Oakville Zen Meditation
Have you ever noted over the years that your ego mind is in starving mode all the time, always complaining and crying like a spoiled baby: “I want more, I want more, I don’t have enough, I am not happy, give me that, give me this, why me, it is unfair”? Its requests are endless: comfort, money, pleasure, sex, power, control, fame, love, recognition, security, understanding, more stuff and so on.
This deprived mind always preoccupied with the future can be a powerful destructive force in our daily life. Using thoughts as weapon our starving and deprived mind will tell you that you are deficient or defective in something or that you are not behaving properly. Therefore you can easily be convinced that something is totally wrong with you and that by having more and more and more or by changing your behavior and thinking would fix everything in your life.
Our addicted, starving and deprived ego mind has enormous deceptive power on our thinking, feelings and behavior. It knows very well how to fool us and even makes us feel hopeless while facing love ones, people, work and life in general.
How can we deal with this deceptive mind?
Simply by learning to tame this beast progressively using daily meditation.
Daily practice of mindfulness meditation will help you to acquaint you with your ego mind and its siblings starving and deprived minds. Meditation is the greatest and simplest way to be mindful to ongoing thoughts and by deleting those thoughts you will avoid to be carried away by them.
Meditation is the only known tool to control our mind. Without learning how to be mindful to our thoughts that is to pay attention to them it is impossible to pretend having any control on them and on our mind. The analogy will be the following: you have to concentrate on the target if you want to properly fire a shot in its center. Without this mindfulness - that is mental concentration skill - aiming at the center of this target is pure wishful thinking.
In other words it is only by focusing on our thoughts that we are able to control them. To think of our thoughts with the goal of controlling them seems a pretty weird concept but it is full of common sense. This practice has been developed and used for thousands year but the Western world has discover this Oriental practice only one century ago.
Thanks.
Ven. Ji Gong Sunim. March 30th 2015
