You have a brain and a mind. They produce thoughts which are responses to perceptions. That's their job. Just like all organs have of the body have a job to do, and produce chemicals and energy in some form, so the brain produces thoughts.

You should be happy that your brain and mind are making thoughts all the time. That means they are functioning normally.

From the viewpoint of meditation, you want to break emotional attachments to thoughts for two purposes - 1. being able to more clearly understand thoughts, how they arise and fall, and 2. being able to reduce thinking activity at the ego level (producing a quieter mind).

From a metaphysical standpoint, all your emotional issues in life are bodies of thought complexes. Therefore, being able to break the mind down to where single thoughts can be isolated and the process by which they arise and fall is a very useful skill to have if you want to become an emotionally balanced person.

This skill will also help you deal with emotional issues that have upset you for many years, and even help clear away PTSD, habit-patterns, and clear up stuck viewpoints.

This is how meditation clears up karma. It's not rocket science. It's just developing meditation to the point where it becomes a tool you can use for emotional processing.

Beyond emotional processing, meditation can allow you to experience deep states of consciousness, bliss, and peace which are always available, but which the mind is usually too preocuupied with its thoughts to feel on an ongoing basis.

But, if you meditate everyday for decades, and find some times during those decades of practice where you can clear your calendar for deeper meditative exploration (such as 21 day vipassana camps, or meditation camp weekends, etc) you can start contacting the deeper states more regularly.

The effect this has is to make the deeper states your reference point for the mind, instead of the agitated surface thoughts. In other words, through regular meditation practice, and particularly through repeated experience of the deeper states of meditation, you start to develop a meditative vewpoint for your whole life.

The meditative experience becomes like a background for you. This brings a level of everyday, day-in, day-out happiness and emotional balance that most people seem not to be able to achieve.

It is not that they can't achieve it. They just haven't taken the time and focused on the practice (much like music - most anyone can be a good musician, very few take the time and practice needed).

When the meditative viewpoint settles in as your background experience, it is no longer necessary to try to monitor your thoughts all the time because the meditative perspective is already established, thus freeing you from over-attachment to your emotional creations.

The science of all this is pretty well established, and there are many different techniques and courses of study available nowadays by which this result - the establishment of the meditative viewpoint - can be accomplished.

You don't have to be a saint, a holy person, or born rich, or be from India, or any of that. You just have to commit, make the time, and do it as a regular practice. Like athletics, music, fine arts, writing, or any other skill you want to develop.

There is some very interesting insight regarding this question if one clicks my name below.

"The Mind, the game, the two authors"

Aloha Roslynn and Everyone

I loved watching this film, P. S. I love you! There is a scene in the film where the husband is asking his wife, "Is this one of these conversations you are having in your head?" I just clicked Richard's name and scrolled down his site to click: Watching the pink dot. It would be pink then start to disappear and turn to green and it was amazing how our mind changes as we innocently change our focus without realizing it. I was grateful for Richard's explanation.

Deepak Chopra shares our thoughts that we have today, create our tomorrow. And I guess it is like a down hill racer, where there is an object in the path it is not to focus on it. There is a difference in suffering and pain. With suffering it is all the shoulds and coulds where physical pain is temporary. It is only knowing some questions can only be answered by God that I have peace of mind. The leash is wide open.

I had a Spiritual Teacher say, "In Africa or China it might be sticks or stones, but in this country it is movies that take you to that next place." And of course now with the speed up with technology, I feel we are truly making that shift. As yogi-one shares that meditation becomes a tool to process emotional drama to be clear minded. And because we always don't know what we want to say till we say it, while at the same time we are having the same conversation over and over:) like the pink dot. It is to release the war-driven thoughts of Why? to Why not! To let the new thought rise while sending Love to be conscious we live in a loving thought responsive universe. Nobody shoots off their foot. love patty

Roslynn,

I used to have a lot of free play with my thoughts. A lot of room to bounce around. It reminds me of a triangle because now, years later, I don't have much room. It's as if there has been a journey up the mountain and there is less room now for play.

As one evolves through the dysfunction of tangled wires (childhood brain patterns created to protect oneself) of emotions, thoughts and actions one cannot repeat past patterns. It's as if old patterns are erased. With time one can see more and momentary choices are more pointed.

I think it has to do with alignment as the triangle takes on more angles and points while center (soul resounding rather than ego) holds the vibrational focus.

This traingle image comes up from the language of the Sacred Feminine. It's a space beyond choice. She spontaneously emits inspiration -- a unique angle of information.

Choice requires conscious deliberatation while spontaneity rises from the unconscious. It's the middle ground of the sub-conscious that needs to be cleared and purified so the upper and lower can connect.

It also looks like an arc with feminine (-) on one side and masculine (+) on the other. At the top center of the arc is (-/+) whole brain knowing.

I'm writing a book about the Language of the Sacred Feminine and it will include this way of seeing.

Trish~~

Dear Trish,

Good luck with your book. From what you write hereabove this sounds very interesting.

Would love to read it when it is ready :)

Love, Mieke

Hi Roslynn,
I just read this and wanted to share with you.
(it's a bit long, but nice to read)

from The Cha-Cha Effect:
by Maya Talisman Frost

My grandmother used to say that the secret to living a good life is maintaining a flexible spine and a flexible mind. Whether we’re talking about joints or brains, there’s just no room for rigidity.

Mark Twain once made a comment that illustrates my grandmother’s idea perfectly. He said: “It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it.”

That’s exactly what we need to do in order to be open to new ideas. We’ve got to take our brains out and dance on them! Do the twist. Do a little clogging. Tap. Cha-Cha. Shake it like a Polaroid picture. We all know people whose brains we’d like to flamenco. And if we’re honest, we’ll admit to needing to have our own brain danced upon from time to time.

It’s not that we set out to be rigid. We establish certain thinking patterns and we build whole belief systems that may or may not serve us well.

At some point, we get complacent, lazy, or just plain clueless about the boxes we’ve built for ourselves.

We humans have an interesting way of hanging on to old thoughts and beliefs. We end up with a cupboard full of ideas past their shelf life - unexamined, unused, but still taking up space.

Our thoughts become incredibly repetitive as certain cues pop up in the course of the day.

No matter what you’re facing in life, you have cues that bring it up for you again and again. You thought about it yesterday, you’re thinking about it today, and you’re going to think about it again tomorrow.

What if you did some applied thinking? Not just that casual sort of obsessing you do daily, but serious applied thought?

We need to learn how to think more efficiently and effectively.

Dr. Edward de Bono is a former Rhodes scholar who was on the faculty at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard universities. He is considered the world’s foremost authority on creative thinking.

Okay, the guy’s brilliant. But the cool thing about de Bono is that he wasn’t interested in revealing his method only to those who breathed the rarified air of the world’s finest universities.

He was passionate about developing a way to teach creative thinking that was so simple even a five-year-old could benefit from it.

He coined the term “lateral thinking” and set about developing clear, visual ways to enhance the way we think.

He uses the image of a car. Just because you’re in a good, quality car does not mean you are a good driver. You must learn how to drive. Some people are better than others, but everyone can acquire a reasonable amount of skill. You must have the desire to learn and spend time practicing. Once you become good at it, it’s easy and enjoyable.

De Bono believes that good thinkers aren’t born - they’re made. He says there are two dangerous fallacies: that if you’re intelligent, you don’t need to do anything about your thinking, and that if you have a more humble intelligence level, there’s nothing you can do about your thinking.

De Bono inspires us to develop a broad view. The broader your knowledge base, the better your thinking. De Bono actually came up with the phrase, “think outside the box” - but don’t hold that against him!

It remains a clear image and a permanent part of our language because it immediately conveys the concept of stepping out of our regular patterns.

When you find yourself stuck in your thoughts-of-the-day cycle, go wide. Jump the track. Consciously take your thoughts in a new direction.

Your bones need lateral motion, and so does your brain. You can walk for miles and miles, but unless you add some sideways action, you’re grinding your hipbones in their sockets. Linear thought will get you where you think you want to go, but you will have missed out on tremendous opportunities for gaining perspective.

You’re going to keep on thinking until the day you die. Why not be a bit intentional about it?

Pick your cue, and engage in a full-on effort to replace a repetitive thought cycle with an interesting new twist. Take your brain out to dance in this daring new direction. Flex and stretch it at every opportunity.

Cha-cha-cha, Grandma!

Mieke #5:

How kind of you! I will remember that!

Trish~~