Musings of a Mindwatcher
I had breakfast earlier today at the Komugi Cafe where I spent time reading the day's newspapers. It is one of the simple pleasures of life which I enjoy, especially when I do not need to hurry to go anywhere or to start work.
Now I'm back in my apartment relaxing with a pot of Earl Grey and some soft Jazz music playing on my retro sound system, ready to start typing my blog article of the week. I can see leaves outside my window, swaying a little under the sultry afternoon breeze, bringing back memories of many afternoons like this during my childhood and teenage years back in my hometown.
Sounds and images always evoke memories. Signals from the senses trigger a pattern of firing in my brain, which is what I experience as memories. It feels familiar to me because it is a pattern of firing that I've experienced before. This pattern evokes other patterns of neuronal firings and thus the stream of consciousness continues.
The brain is a continuously pulsing network of energy, flowing along paths that it has forged for itself through repetitions. Each repeated firing cutting deeper channels into the mind, making them more lightly to fire in the future.
When you meditate, you observe these patterns of thoughts. If you are able to see thoughts as mental signals, instead of emotion-evoking memories and recollection, you are doing it right. It is like being aware of the conversation hum in a room of people without listening to them. It is just a beautiful pulsating hum that is part and parcel of the brain's activity in a living human being.
We live in a matrix of energy. Energy impinges on our body and we detect their signals through our senses. At this point, they are yet to be decoded currents of energy which our brain has yet to make sense of. 'Making sense' of something means interpreting the signal based on our framework of understanding, giving these vibrations meaning and context.
Making sense also involves a reaction, in the form of another thought or action. Our ego is a source of energy. When we react, our ego is injecting energy into system, causing further perturbations to it. A living being is naturally an active system: it manipulates its mental states to achieve a certain desired outcome.
The ego dictates and modulates the flow of this mental stream of thoughts. What if we disengage it from the system? That's what mindfulness is all about. We merely observe as unobtrusively as possible, without disturbing the ebb-and-flow of this energy stream that is triggered by both external and internal sources.
The external sources are signals received through our senses while internal ones are the signals of our samskaras - stored energy of the mind, mostly repressed in its subconscious stratum, like coiled springs, ready to spring into action at the opportune moment.
These energetic interactions inside the mind do not cease as long as we are alive. We can increase its complexity by adding the ego into its mix or we can be hands-off, allowing them to play themselves out in the workspace of the mind. That is the meaning of 'working out' ones karma.
Mindfulness meditation becomes simple when you have this model in your mind. You are a passive observer, watching a vibrating and pulsating system of energy--these vrttis of the citta (whirlpools of the mind)--playing themselves out like waves in the ocean. Do not stir them with your egoic thoughts.
The more you practice, the better an observer you are--very much like how a skillful zoologist would approach its subject in its natural habitat without disturbing it. Mindwatching as a hobby can be very fulfilling because you get to learn a lot about the subject, which is--you! Can't think of a better way to know thyself, which is at the heart of living an examined life. And the last time I checked, any other way of approaching life is not worth living.
