Our culture and education have made us quite top-heavy,
I think.
We have a tendency of trying to think our way out of everything,
Even in situations where thinking is a pretty useless tool.
Sure,
Thinking is incredibly useful in many situations,
But it does have its limitations.
But what other tools do we have?
I have a very active mind and I've always been thinking a great deal.
This has been both advantageous to me as well as challenging.
It made me investigate things,
But it also made me doubt.
Much of my identity was bound up with my thinking,
And with the views and opinions that were formed as a result.
Being like that worked reasonably well in my early life,
At school and so on,
But when trying to understand myself and the mind,
It posed some problems.
My thoughts would constantly meddle with the natural process of stilling the mind,
And my identification with them made it impossible to let them just chatter on in the background.
I had all kinds of views about myself,
About how meditation should be,
How my teachers should be,
How the world should be.
There were a lot of shoulds.
I would listen more to my own thinking,
Telling me how things should be,
Rather than how things should be,
Rather than listening to nature,
Telling me how it actually is.
I was trying to understand stuff beyond my present understanding,
And I was trying to do so through thinking,
But my thoughts were locked into their own dance.
They were words,
Concepts,
Constructions,
Built on top of constructions,
Built on top of constructions.
But the foundation was weak,
It was faulty,
So the higher I built,
The more unsteady the construction would become.
But by then I had built so much,
I'd become quite committed to my thought labyrinth.
Maybe I would sound really intelligent,
Hiding behind fancy words,
But I would conceal the fact that I kept running into dead ends.
When we top heavy,
We tend to be like this.
It's scary to admit that one's constructions are lacking,
Especially when one's identity is so bound up with it.
It's scary to start over,
But there's no other way if we want to gain true wisdom.
We need to dig down to the bedrock and build on that,
But it's difficult.
It requires brutal honesty and willingness to know nothing.
But this is where wisdom is born.
To know that you are a prisoner of your mind is the dawn of wisdom.
Having views and opinions are natural,
We can't stop that.
It's just a way our minds work.
But we can gain a deeper understanding of what they are and how they come to be.
This is why we observe,
This is why we meditate.
Most people find it quite difficult to observe their own thinking without getting drawn into it.
That illustrates the problem.
We are so quick to identify with our thoughts,
To assume that we are their thinker.
We seldom realize that even our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own.
For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent,
But which were given to us by our society.
When we hold on tightly to our views,
We don't have the freedom to examine,
To question,
To learn.
But through observing and listening,
We can learn to see views as just views.
We can see that they are not our true nature.
And we can learn to not hold on to them so tightly.
Picking up our views and holding them loosely like this enables us to examine them and explore.
And if others question our views,
We don't feel so threatened.
In the end,
It just gives us an opportunity to grow.
Again,
It becomes clear how important the willingness to be emotionally vulnerable is on this spiritual path.
Because,
In the end,
It is emotional protectionism that make us hold on to our wrong views.
The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.
There comes a leap in consciousness.
Call it intuition or what you will.
The solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.
