Through any spiritual practice, and especially during an intensive experience like a retreat, a deep process goes on under the surface, far beyond what you might consciously perceive.
Thoughts and emotions arise, often with intensity. Deeper thoughts, deeper emotions, and elements from the subconscious might make their presence known for the first time.
This might be confusing or even disturbing. And yet, it is all a part of a purification process. As these buried patterns emerge into the light of consciousness, you have the chance to witness them and allow them to dissolve.
In this context, thoughts and emotions can even become tools for Self-realization, pointers to a reality beyond thought and emotion. If you can hold them in a space of love and awareness, without becoming involved in their content, they can show you something more profound about your experience and your reality.
The Mind’s Natural State
Nisargadatta Maharaj has said: “No particular thought can be the mind’s natural state, only silence. Not the idea of silence, but silence itself. When the mind is in its natural state, it reverses back to silence spontaneously after every thought. […] Or we could say, every thought happens on the background of silence.”
This quote highlights something essential: “No particular thought can be the mind’s natural state,” which means no mental concept, no thought, and no mental representation can be the Reality that we are interested in discovering.
The mind is a domain of images, concepts, and representations. We cause ourselves a great deal of suffering because we generally mistake representation for reality. From this avidya, this primordial misunderstanding of the nature of things, we remain entangled in a domain of shadows and reflections from which no authentic meaning or fulfillment can be derived.
But there is something more real, more fundamental, and more intimate to ourselves. There is a truth that exists before the thought about it or mental representation of it.
Very often, our thoughts project an imaginary reality onto the present moment like a filter. We project a mental world onto the pure living canvas of Awareness. This can happen in any number of forms. It is the multifarious stream of the mind, always involved going into stories or images, recreating the past, projecting into the future, or simply being lost in daydreams.
All of this comprises the mental sphere, a mental projection that is superimposed onto our reality. Very often, this thinking becomes a movement away from the openness and availability of the present moment as it is. It absorbs us, taking us out of the simplicity of the present.
So Much Sound and Fury
Very often, thoughts arise from a lack of contentment, a sense that this moment as it is (or ourselves as we are) needs to be changed or improved.
The thoughts with which we identify strongly, those with which we have a powerful emotional link, create the greatest draw away from the present moment. Thoughts carry with them or evoke different emotions within us.
You may feel sadness, anger, or joy, based not on what is actually happening to you right now but on a memory, daydream, or projection.
These emotions appear to give a solid reality to the thoughts they arise from because the emotions are, in a sense, real. They are an experience in themselves; they are happening to you and they feel very true. There is an energy to these emotions.
But that mental domain that triggered the emotions is an unreality. It is only something you are placing onto the simplicity of the moment.
A simple analogy is watching a movie. Seeing images on the screen, you might get very involved in the plot and characters of the movie. All sorts of emotions arise when things happen to the character you love. If something bad happens, you feel sad; when the problem is solved, you feel genuine relief.
And what happens if you were to “wake up” at that moment?
You realize that you’re watching characters on a screen—it’s all a show of flashing lights and sounds that you’ve interpreted as a reality, and you’re reacting to it as if it were real.
This is a common experience to which we can all probably relate. Yet, in our daily lives, we mostly live in a projected reality, this mental world that we tend to filter ourselves through.
When you go into memories, recreating different moments of your life, or plans and projections about the future, various emotions arise. It’s as if you were watching a movie on the screen of your consciousness.
To wake up in that moment to your own experience would be to recognize that you’re in the mental bubble. To wake up in then is to connect back to the very simplicity of Reality as it is in that moment.
Using the Mind as a Tool
I’m not referring here to using the mind as a tool.
In our daily lives, we need to use our minds all the time. It’s just a question of when we are actually using the mind and when we are instead taken by the mind, absorbed in our thoughts. We’re so accustomed to believing in our thoughts and making a reality out of our thinking. But remember—no thought can be that Presence, that Truth, that Beingness.
The invitation is to rest back in the intimate sense of being that is not a thought or a mental image. When you look closely, you can see that even the concept of yourself as a personality arises out of thoughts. So long as the thoughts are there, then the story of “me” is also there. But in the absence of any thought, “Who am I?”
Opening towards this intimacy, towards this depth beyond any thought, there is a more intimate, more authentic “me,” a sense of “I” in the Heart, which comes not from the mind but from a deeper Presence, from Beingness itself.
When thoughts arise, notice how they tend to absorb you. At that moment, you may consciously choose not to feed them, not to give them your interest, and not to give reality to those thoughts, but instead to recognize the process of what is happening, and, in this way, rest back in that Presence.
When combined with action, this resting in Stillness becomes the path of Karma Yoga.
What would it be like to chop carrots, sweep the floor, drive your car, or whatever work you may be doing, and simply not lend any reality to thoughts?
Again, it isn’t that the mind can’t be used as a tool. As the Buddhist saying goes, the mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master! In any action, you are engaging the mind, but you can choose to anchor yourself first in that simplicity of Being. Only from there can you genuinely engage the mind as a tool.
A beautiful way of doing this, especially in the context of Karma Yoga, is to anchor yourself first in the physical body and the senses: the sense of touch, the sense of smell, the air around you. Anchoring yourself in the bare content of the present moment, before the imposition of thoughts and labels, can anchor you into Presence itself. From there, you may find more space to observe your thoughts and the thinking process.
Curiosity and Intention
You don’t need to feel any sense of tightness or restriction, but approach it with curiosity: “What is happening in my experience? Honestly, what is happening in each moment? How are these thoughts arising? How are they taking me? How real is this at this moment?”
Like a scientist, you begin to observe the process of your own mind and the different mental worlds that can exist in any situation. In this way, any action becomes a purification process, a deconstruction of your ordinary, conditioned mode of acting and reacting. It all begins from an intention to know ourselves beyond the surface level, to anchor ourselves into that depth of our true being.
When we have this background intention, thoughts and everything else can be a pointer to that simplicity of the Present Moment, the simplicity of What Is.
David is a Hridaya Yoga teacher and contributor to our blog.
