Somebody teaches us to sit down, sit still, close your eyes, and let go of your thoughts. That’s a strange idea for most of us, that we should let go of our thoughts, meaning all thoughts. Doesn’t mean have good thoughts or good insights. It means let go of all of the operations of the mind – our memory, our reason, our imagination, our thinking of the past or thinking of the future, the way we analyse our fears, our hopes, our desires, all of the stuff, all of the activity going on in our mental space all the time. The teaching is, let go of it, lay aside your thoughts. And we lay aside our thoughts by saying our mantra. A very simple discipline, and yet one that we discover to be quite challenging, because we discover just how noisy and active the mind is, how many waves of thought are going through our mind all the time. That’s the first level of consciousness, the monkey mind.
( Breakthrough by Laurence Freeman OSB )
