Just take a moment and notice the thoughts you are thinking in your head right now. No need to judge them, evaluate them, push them away or do anything else. Just become a witness to the mental activity that is going on in your head. You’ll notice that you are either thinking about the past or the future. Both are unreal. They do not exist. The past is no more and the future hasn’t arrived yet.
What is real? Only the present moment. The atomic moment sandwiched between the past and the future. You cannot think about it. How can you think about it? Just try. By the time you have thought about it, it has passed and become past. You cannot think and be in the present at the same time.
You can be present to your thinking. By being a witness to it. By not letting yourself be identified with it. For example, as I am writing this, it feels like I am transcribing. The words are just showing up in my conscious awareness and I am just writing them down word for word. Sometimes, nothing comes. It just means that nothing has to be written. I just wait. Now, if I force myself to come up with things, a stress, a tension, a pressure can build up within me.
Its as if I have started a fight against existence. It is existence and the universal intelligence that is speaking to me as I am writing this. If I force things out when the existence (It) doesn’t want to, I am basically under the impression that I know more and better than It. I am a part of existence. The part cannot fight with the whole. It is silly. It is stupid. This fight can only be done by thinking.
A lot of things have to be understood. First, we will have to differentiate between the first type of thinking, where the thoughts were coming to me and I was a witness and the second type of thinking which I was using to fight with the Source. Secondly, we will take a look at what causes the second type of thinking and understand how to get rid of it.
The first type of thinking is something where you are completely passive. You are not doing anything. Just witnessing. Its almost as if you are a receiver and messages are being broadcasted to you. There is no effort on your part. It’s as if you are not there. You are completely absent. Something else is present. It is not a thing. It has no form. You can say that its a presence. Words float out of nowhere. This is in my case where I’m writing or speaking. If I’m doing some other activity like playing cricket or pickleball, this shows up as action and movement. You are a hollow bamboo and existence is playing you as a flute and producing music.
You are like a receiver receiving a transmission and the message is flowing to and through you into the world. It has your flavour. It has your essence. No two people can express this flow in the same way. Your body just responds naturally to it. Absolutely effortlessly. You lose track of time. A lot of people call this state FLOW. It would not be right to call this as thinking. The vehicle of communication or transmission is thought, but there is no engagement from you. There’s no judgement, analysis or evaluation being done by you. You are pure consciousness witnessing the entire phenomenon. You are also witnessing your body performing the action as well. Just like how I am right now witnessing me writing these words. Almost everytime I finish writing or speaking, I’m amazed with my own insights which were expressed through me. It feels almost unfair to take credit for it. This is the first type of “thinking”. Its effortless, useful and feels really really good.
The way you are feeling is the best indicator of how much you are in the first type of thinking versus the second type of thinking. When you are absent, and by you I mean the ego, is absent, you are whole and complete. Your sense of I is what gives you the feeling of separation. Only if there is a separation between you and the whole, the ego can survive.
The ego is an illusion. It is a projection. It is created by the mind via the second type of thinking. The one where you have been disillusioned by your own thinking. For example, as I am writing this, I am aware of the words coming to me from the Source and also a sidetrack of mental chatter going on. I’m able to see me thinking about how all this is going to sound if someone reads it. What if they think I have gone mad, insane. A lot of criticism and feedback about how and what I’m writing. I’m also aware of a train of thought of how I can monetise this writing by writing a book and so on and so forth.
If you notice, all the thinking is either about the past or the future. I am creating something called ‘Khayali pulao’, meaning an illusionary dream, within my head using this thinking. Its really enticing and I get sucked into it from time to time. The moment you have identified with this thinking, you have lost touch with the present moment and the presence that’s guiding you on a moment to moment basis.
This thinking can also masquerade itself as if its coming from the source. I got caught up in the ‘monetising’ thinking for a while and ended up daydreaming about publishing the book and it becoming a bestseller. I literally haven’t even written a decent number of words and my mind has already started creating daydreams about the future. I also feel really good when I am in that dream. I feel happy. But if you understand that this happiness is dangerous because it is being created by something unreal and illusionary. This happiness is false and pseudo. It is the opposite of unhappiness which is bound to show up like a swinging pendulum.
It won’t take a lot of time for the pendulum to swing back to the other side. The dream that’s creating my happiness will soon be changed to something else. Maybe it will start making me feel anxious or guilty because I am not working towards fulfilling my beautiful dream of publishing the book. The dream that was creating my happiness has now turned on its head and will start creating unhappiness for me. If I get bored with my unhappiness, the mind will again start creating dreams of wonder and make me feel happy again. Nothing gets done and you end up swinging like a pendulum.
This keeps happening with all of us in different ways and its very easy to miss if you are not very alert. The mind continues doing this because that’s the only way it can stay alive. This mental activity, disturbance, thinking is the mind. If all thinking ceases, if you become sky like, vast, open, letting the thoughts float by like clouds, the mind ceases to exist. You are brought to the eternal present.
The present is the only moment that exists. Anything that can be done by you can only be done in the now. You cannot even lift a finger in the future. The future will always come to you as the present. If you want to lift your finger, you can only do it now. Always now. Anything that takes you away from the real, the now, is absolutely useless. What are you going to do thinking about the future or the past. Its absolutely useless because the past cannot be changed and the future cannot be predicted. Whatever you think about the future will be according to what you know now. The current circumstances, your current mood, your experiences till now etc. But you are thinking about the future. You cannot predict the changes in the circumstances, moods or anything else. You are just wasting away your time and energy day dreaming with your eyes open!
For example, I got really excited about the book publishing idea and I started dreaming about all the things I can do and how good it will feel to be a published author and become famous and get invited to podcasts and so on and so forth. See how powerful this phenomenon is? If one is not very alert, one can spend their entire lives living here and not knowing why they are feeling so drained and miserable.
The most important thing is to notice the root cause of this thinking. These thoughts are just the leaves of the tree. Getting rid of them will only cause more leaves to grow. If you want to destroy the tree of misery and thinking, you will have to go to the very roots and destroy it. All thinking is created due to an underlying desire.
What is desire? A desire is an idea that there is something better in the future. The present reality is insufficient. There’s something missing right now which when achieved is going to make you feel better. You are creating a private world within your head which is better than the world you are experiencing right now.
Infact, you cannot see your present clearly because of the cloudiness caused by your desires. You are in a dream, an illusion. You are not satisfied. You are tense, anxious. Because you know that to achieve the desire is going to take time. It can only be achieved in the future. This means you cannot be completely happy right now. How can you be? According to you, what you want cannot be achieved right now, otherwise the desire wouldn’t be there. The very fact that you are desiring something means that you don’t have it. Otherwise why will you desire in the first place?
You desire to build a house because you don’t have a house. You desire to be rich because you don’t have money right now. You desire heaven, paradise, mokshaa because you are not there right now. You desire happiness, peace and joy because you are not feeling happy, peaceful and joyous right now. You desire power because you are feeling powerless right now. You are desiring God because you haven’t found him right now.
What you are desiring does not matter. A desiring mind is always focused on the future. His life is filled with worry, anxiety, chaos and confusion. He’s trying to swim upstream a river which is flowing towards the ocean. You are trying to reach the ocean by going against the river. It’s completely futile. It is a terrible waste of time, energy and life.
People go on and on desiring their entire lives, constantly thinking about the future, completely missing out the present moment. One desire ends and another desire shows up. Only the object of desire keeps changing. You desire riches, then waste your entire life toiling for it and when you achieve it, it just gives you a fleeting happiness. You feel empty. Now what? What do I do? Your mind becomes restless. It starts searching for other desires. You either desire for more riches or you renounce it and start desiring for eternal richness in the other world after your death. Heaven, paradise become your new object of desires. You now start toiling for that now. A very subtle trick of the ego.
You will not find a single usecase for desire. It is absolutely useless. Completely useless and harmful. Firstly, it creates unnecessary stress within us. Everytime a desire brews within you and you start paying more and more attention towards it, you’ll notice feelings of stress and anxiety within. The more the desire for a new house the more you start hating your current house. The more the desire for an ideal situation or circumstance the more you hate your current situation. The stronger the dream in your head becomes the cloudier you get. You become more and more disillusioned. Your present reality keeps getting more and more obscure. You start seeing it through the kaleidoscope of your desire. A comparison is bound to happen. My dream world looks so good. Why can’t my reality look and feel like this? All the differences start becoming bigger and bigger and you start getting more and more frustrated with what is. You start spending more and more time dreaming. It becomes a dangerous habit and starts spreading to all areas of your life.
(Maroon ink from here.)
The irony is that this makes you completely unproductive. All actions can be taken only in the present. If you are clouded and stressed by your desires, do you think something productive can come out of you? No. It’s just not possible. If you have a certain bandwidth of mental activity, and if a part of that is taken up by thinking, the bandwidth left for presence and intelligence reduces. It becomes more and more difficult to come up with creative ideas. An idea is creative when it is actually created. It has to be created out of nothing. Totally new. Brand new. Only when it surprises you. It just comes out of nowhere like a flash of lightning. You are left wondering about why didn’t I think about this before. So simple, so elegant, just perfect. The timing is perfect, the method of delivery is perfect. It changes something within you. You are not the same again. How can you be? Something totally brand new has been added to your consciousness. It has expanded. You are seeing things very differently now. You are a new person. Perfectly suited for the task at hand.
This is called being productive. I would say be creative instead of being productive. What’s the use of producing, replicating when you can be creative. Every moment you are being created anew. Everything is in motion within you. Your body is changing, emotions are changing, thoughts and feelings are moving. Existence is constantly creating us new.
We are connected to the sun’s power source and instead of harnessing that, we go about life with a battery pack.