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| where the sand stops and the water begins. |
your thoughts, our thoughts, have a life of their own. like a noisy disorderly day care, the monkey mind bounces from place to place. at times at rest, others restless and filled with worries or concerns or simply annoyances. seemingly in congruent thoughts come out of nowhere, mostly they go away. occasionally they linger and will cause me to perform some real word activity to calm it or move the moment along.
why do they come and go? like the sand on the beach, the series of thoughts are so many and so similar but also all different. they change as well, as we age, as we get involved in different relationships and situations. below is a nice snap shot of what thoughts can be, or become when we let them go. when we stop grasping at their meaning and simply allow them to flow from thought to thought, like the winds.
If you sit still for a while, completely relaxed and let your thoughts run on, let you mind think of whatever it likes, without interfering, without making suggestions and without rating any kind of obstacle to the free flow of thougt, you will soon discover that mental processes have a life of their own. They will call one another to the surface of consciousness by association, and if you raise no barriers, you will soon find yourself thinking all matter of things both fantastic and terrible which you ordinarily keep out of your consciousness. Over a period of time this exercise will show you that you have in yourself the potentiality of countless different beings—the animal, the demon, the sayer, the thief, the murderer—so that in time you will be able to feel that no aspect of human life is strange to you— human nihil a me alien puto. In the ordinary way consciousness is forever interfering with the waters of the mind, which are dark and turbulent, concealing the depths. But when, for a while, you let them take care of themselves the mud settles and with growing clarity you see the foundations of life and all the denizens of the deep.You may see other things as well. “Two men looked in the pond said the one: ‘I see a quantity of mud, a shoe and an old can’ Said the other: ‘I see all these, but I also see the glorious reflection of the sky.” For the unconscious is not, as some imagine, a mental refuse-pit; it is simply unfettered nature, demonic and divine, painful and pleasant, hideous and lovely, cruel and compassionate destructive and creative. It is the source of heroism, love, and inspiration as well as of fear, hatred, and crime. Indeed, it is as if we carried inside of us an exact duplicate of the world we see around us, for the world is a mirror of the soul, and the soul is a mirror of the world. Therefore, when you learn to feel the unconscious you begin to understand not only yourself but others as well, and when you look upon human crime and stupidity, you can say with real feeling, “There but for the Grace of God I go.”
Alan Watts-
