Where is the mind? Why doesn’t my mind let me sit still, and why is it negative? Why, whenever I try to meditate, does it wander so much?
Where is the mind? The mind is nowhere; we can’t pinpoint and say, ‘This is where the mind is.’ But what we do know is that we experience the mind through the brain.
We know this because things that happen to our brain affect our mind. If you drink alcohol, a very physical substance that has a very physical reaction on your blood and your brain, your experience of your mind changes. Maybe you were feeling really stressed, so you had a drink and now you’re not so stressed. Maybe you were feeling shy, so you drank and now you’re ready to dance with the world. We know that what is physical impacts the mind, ranging from alcohol and drugs to brain injuries and degenerative illnesses. We know that the brain is the seat of our experience of the mind.
Recently someone very close to us passed away of Alzheimer’s. I know from my personal background in neurology about the part of the brain that is affected by Alzheimer’s. We watched her disintegrate, her brain disintegrate. Here was a woman who used to be loving, kind and generous, who had suddenly become angry and violent, hitting people around her, not recognizing her own family members. It really, really made me wonder—God, love feels so deep, it runs deep in my heart and soul. Yet, let me challenge that now. With a little bit of degeneration of the dendrites and glial cells in the brain, where does that which we identify as the deepest love go? How does that love give way owing to mere connections between brain cells breaking down?
Love lives in the heart, not in the dendrites. Are we that shallow?
This made me start to think, as she was the first person I knew so closely to have this sort of illness, and having studied about it, I was fascinated by what was happening.
Here’s what I realized. Of course love doesn’t live in our dendrites or glial cells. Of course it is much deeper than that. Yet, the brain is the medium for the experience, the same way that the eyes are the medium for the experience of sight. Sight does not exist in my eyes, but if you pull out my eyes, I will no longer be able to see. Similarly, I can have perfect eyes, but if you damage the occipital lobe of my brain, I will no longer see. The faculty of sight remains, the people I could see are still there, the world is still there even though it’s become dark to me, so where did that image exist? Thus the brain is the medium through which we experience the mind.
Now, why doesn’t it let me sit still? Why is it negative? First of all, it’s not always negative. The positive stuff is actually just as distracting as the negative. It’s more enjoyably distracting. Daydreaming is fun, but unfortunately, it is the opposite of meditation. While we may enjoy it, it’s just as detrimental to being in the present as negativity.
The mind tends to be negative because we have got habituated to negativity. Children’s minds are not negative. They’re usually happy and smiling. They’re only negative when they’re hungry, tired or have a full diaper—experiencing base instincts. Feed them, clean them and they’re happy again. Hold them, love them and they’re extra happy. In adults, the mind starts to steal their happiness.
As we grow older, we decide that there’s some problem in the world or within us. Depending on how we’ve been raised, we end up with one of the two pathologies: either ‘I’m the worst, I don’t deserve anything’, or ‘I deserve everything but the world isn’t giving it to me’. In either case, it’s negativity. Frequently, they run right into each other as: ‘I’m bitter, I’m angry, things aren’t fair’, morphing into ‘I’m the worst, I can’t believe I’m thinking like this, I’ll never be spiritual, even God doesn’t like me.’
The other thing that the mind does is to judge. Again, this comes from our culture, it’s how we are raised: ‘This is pretty, this is ugly, this is nice, this is bad. This is what good girls do, this is what bad girls do.’ We’re constantly labelling, constantly judging: ‘Mommy’s pretty little girl’, ‘Mommy’s bad girl’. So, we develop a habit, this sanskara , of labelling things, and carry it into our world: ‘I’m beautiful, I’m ugly. I’m successful, I’m a failure. I’m worthy, I’m not worthy.’
This is what occupies the mind, and it is never-ending. With seven billion people on the planet, there is no end to the number of those with whom you can compare yourself, to the judgements you can pass. With all these games of the mind, I am everywhere except here in the present moment. Because the truth is that right here in this breath, in this moment, I’m OK. I’m enough. It’s enough. This breath is enough. This presence is enough.
When you start meditating, the mind amps up what it does. Love, surrender, acceptance and enough-ness are enemies of the part of the mind that indulges in competition and negativity.
When you begin to touch another, deeper layer of the Self, the negative thoughts appear, sometimes in different forms. But every time we go further on our spiritual paths, every time we start to surrender more, experience our own enough-ness more, connect deeper, these thoughts recede.
You may not notice your wandering mind so much until you sit to meditate.
It’s not the mind that’s the enemy, and it’s not even the negative thoughts, but they both need to understand that they are not in charge. If you want to solve a math problem, you need your mind. If you need to sort something out, to be effective, to be efficient, you need your mind. My intuitive heart has no idea how to make a spreadsheet; my mind knows how to do that. So, we need it, but it’s not supposed to be running the show. It’s supposed to be a tool in our hands. This is where meditation becomes so important. It enables us to get out of the clutches of the mind, and to re-experience not being run by the mind. And eventually, we’re able to string more and more of those moments together.