What are the states of mind?
The cloud example.
There are many ways to characterize the states of mind. Here I will write about states of mind according to our mindfulness practice. If you look at the mind long enough Like looking at the clouds on a windy day, you will notice, the thoughts. Thoughts which travel across the time, in the cross section of present. And you would notice, there are moments of silence in between. So essentially, there are two states of mind, one with thinking, and one without thinking, or in between thinking. One with thinking is like a cloud in the sky, one without thinking is the sky without the cloud.
The mindfulness example.
That is the general states of the mind, with thoughts and without thoughts. However, if you consider the awareness, or the mindfulness. You would notice this is also another way of categorization.
What is mindfulness, is answered in the previous article. If I summaries, mindfulness is being aware of the awareness. It is like the grandfather of our normal awareness, which allow us to do things in our daily lives. It is trying to notice the observer himself. I say trying, because ultimately you will end up finding there is nothing other than just an observation. Just like we tried to explain in the previous article on ownership. However, for here, we can say, there are two states of the mind, One with awareness on awareness, and one without awareness on awareness.
It is important to recognize that such awareness of awareness can only arise with wisdom. I can give you an example. Imagine you see a rabbit, just running across the road. For a fraction of a second you saw the rabbit. And now consider the following.
One who is not aware would not even see the rabbit.
One who is aware, would see the rabbit, and get surprised and think about how he is going to tell his friends and family about this fascinating story of the rabbit who ran in front of his feet. And he will sing a song and write a novel about the rabbit.
One who is aware of the awareness, will see the rabbit, and after that he would notice, he no longer sees the rabbit. And then he would notice the thoughts about the rabbit which followed the vision of the rabbit. Then he would notice his awareness which keeps on observing the awareness. And then he would notice the birds singing in the trees, and the thoughts which follow the birds. And this is a continuous process. he would notice that this keeps on happening, endlessly like the waves of the sea.
states of mind - from chaos to silence and peace.
Mind which is untrained is usually in chaos. It moves, with external forces here and there. But the mind, which is trained, will quickly turn back into its normal state. Which is simple and pure. But this is not what we try to achieve in traditional meditation. In traditional meditation, we try to suppress our consciousness, to whatever we desire, and try to create an artificial solidarity which is peaceful in itself. However, in mindfulness, we try to observe the futile process, which is happening in our minds, day in an out, like the Sisyphus who was punished. And when the mind understands this process, it gains wisdom, that there is nothing to do about it. No matter how much we try to control this, it would not settle. And the mind will understand the futile nature of the search. It will understand that there is nothing but a search, the search itself is the one which fuels the process.
Would you like to find out yourself what secrets your mind holds from you? If so, I suggest you start looking at yourself in mindfulness, starting from today. Until wisdom is powerful enough to pull you out from inevitable death. Which I call a mind at peace.
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