I seem to be exhausting myself trying to figure out how my mind works; in other words, I'm spending too much time thinking about thinking, which seems to defeat the whole notion of "letting go" and "living in the moment" and such. But then again, if you're thinking about what you're thinking, isn't that dissecting the moment into teeny pieces and overfocusing? Hacking up the moment? Not allowing the moment to transition on to the next as moments seem to do?
I'm doing it right now, aren't I?
Rats. Let's try this again.
It's raining out. A lot. I like cheese (There's no cheese here at this moment -- speculation). I want to watch this thunderstorm from my bed but I can't (Oops -- future-watching). It's hard to stay in the moment (Hmmm...observation of present difficulty? That's a little better...)
How 'bout this: moment moment moment moment moment. If you say that fast enough it starts to sound like "OM." Maybe meditation began when someone with a hamster-wheel-brain like myself got fed up with adages they couldn't live up to and started being silly.
The best things always have silly starts, no?
Great. Now I'm thinking about the past. Time to go to work.
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According to some of those science folks, we became fully human when we acquired the ability to imagine and plan for the future, which I suppose must imply the ability to analyze the past and draw lessons from it. This is obviously a dandy strategy for taking over the world, but along with it comes the tendency to worry (particularly about the prospect of death) and to regret past mistakes. I've always thought that the loss of innocence that Genesis says resulted from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge was a metaphor for this.
ReplyDeleteI think meditation is an attempt to escape for awhile from the downside of the human way of thinking.
If you really want to think about thinking, try reading "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. According to him, we had another leap in consciousness long after we "became" human.
I also like cheese.