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ONE OF THE EFFECTS of meditation is that
thoughts lose their "significant" status. Usually we
are imbedded in our thoughts (and the feelings they evoke). Your
thoughts and feeling pull strongly on your attention, drawing
you into an inner world, somewhat removed from the outer world.
We, in a sense, live in our thoughts. They strongly color
our experience.
When you meditate, you continually interrupt
your own thoughts. You dismiss your thoughts and go back to the
mantra or your breath. Slowly but surely, your thoughts lose
their status. Instead of the natural rulers, thoughts become
annoying pests.
This change in your relationship with your
own thoughts is an important side-effect of meditation, and is
probably responsible for many of meditation's benefits. This
new, lower status of your thoughts allows you to gain a kind
of detachment from the drama of your daily life — the drama
that normally captures and enmeshes you so much. It allows you
to maintain your inner peace for more and more of your life.
Again and again you get sucked into the
thought-world only to realize you've been lost in a daydream,
and you drop it and come back to the mantra. Over time, you begin
to understand that you've been lost in a daydream a good portion
of your life, and that the daydream is in many ways what you
used to give the most significance.
But thoughts are not the enemy. Your own
attachment to the thoughts is what prevents peace. And
as you do your regular meditation, you naturally and easily feel
less and less attached to the thoughts, and you become more and
more happy and peaceful. |
