Scared to push life away: Two possibilities why a person wouldn’t push back their minds to participate fully with meditation are 1) the future and 2) superstition. The first reason is that such a person is overcome with a sense of duty and pride for the building up of their lives and that duty manifests first through thoughts. In their mind, they are the painter and their life is the canvas waiting to be colored. The potential beauty of their work depends on them, the artist. Life will not become beautiful on its own so they must spend every second either in action or in thought making it so. The second reason is that they are beguiled by the mind and the superstitious belief that the mind is real and thoughts, on their own, hold consequence.
It’s good to know that neurologically, the inability to push back the mind is normal. The mind is not supposed to be pushed back. Focusing away from thoughts or being fixated with them is the consequence of heightened or depressed activation in certain sections of the brain and a healthy brain does both naturally. The yogis knew this and identified the mind as normally unstoppable. The simple solution to rejecting thoughts is to keep trying and the ability to refocus away from thinking will increase. But there is a conceptual layer to this problem that when recognized provides enough clarity to spark our willpower in the moment of its need. Before those concepts, the first step here is to acknowledge the inability to reject thoughts is actually unwillingness. We want to think because thinking is how we survive, succeed, and achieve, and thoughts are the first battalions we command to win our lives.
The world to our evolutionary minds is a place of limited resources, filled with opportunity and reward for those savvy enough to win it. Evolution is nature’s way of participating with this game of competition but it is wholly unconscious to almost every species that is shaped by it. A Green Wobbler Finch doesn’t know why its beak is longer than its cousin’s, the large ground finch, and still shorter than its other cousin, the Oahu Creeper. There is no thought of their physiological advantage or its. Nature chooses and the finches more than blindly operate through those decisions.
The sexual selection of female Finches curated the physiology of their chicks over generations because they chose male finches that were especially successful at hunting and foraging in their environments. This is Darwin’s discovery of natural selection, the driving force of evolution. They are what they are and behave how they behave. An animal is not responsible for its instincts and not haunted by the possibility of changing them either. For an organism to change its physiology or behavior takes time. While human physiology is still governed by the pacing of nature, (advances in technology is changing that, too) our behavior is not. For that reason, we see life, as well as ourselves, as something to manipulate, reap, and sow. This provides us with a unique relationship to the future and our future selves. Like children locked on their screens during a road trip, we are all hypnotically seized by the future. The road trip is our life. We see it as being in our hands or within reach. The future is the impetus to keep thinking, strategizing, organizing, and reorganizing our world-view and to-do’s because now we are in control of the wide array of destinies accessible to us. Our health, happiness, and wealth are on the line. This self-consciousness is as much a burden as it is a gift as it rips us away from… the now.
There is a story of a farmer who has hit a rough patch. The rains have been sparse, the crows, cows, goats, and wild antelope and boar have been hungry and desperate for food, and he is growing old. One day, Indra – an ancient Hindu God of Heaven, is seen walking through the hills. The farmer approached the deity and asked for aid. “Let the rains come, protect my crops, or give me strength.” Like all of us, we know we could be better off if the circumstances were pushed into our favor or if we, somehow became more capable. Indra denied the request, explaining that the universe is a difficult thing to manage. It is a complex organism and its many systems must be balanced through its cycles. If there are no rains it is for a reason. If animals consume the crops, it is for a reason. If you have become old and weak, it is for a reason. The farmer insisted and begged. As Indra left, the farmer cursed Indra, denouncing his ability. “It cannot be that difficult to manage the heavens with all your power! I could provide myself with what I needed and keep the systems in balance.” People have a funny habit of diminishing the responsibilities of power and the burden of being powerful. Gods have a funny habit of teaching humankind lessons. Indra considered it and then agreed to give the man more than what he asked. Rather than providing rain, protection for the crops, or the old man vitality, Indra gave the man his power and his duty. Now the farmer was responsible for heaven and everything within it.
The farmer immediately granted his own requests. As the months of prosperous conditions continued, rumors of neighboring villages flooding or drying up reached the farmer. The Sun started to rise later and later. The seasons were becoming unpredictable. The plants started to wither, drown, freeze, and burn. The animals started behaving strangely, and the farmer grew more and more exhausted. He forgot about the rains, he forgot when it should stop raining. He lost track of the days and of time. He begged for Indra to take his power back and anchor the world back into its natural cycles. It was the moment Indra had been waiting for.
This is the way we interact with our lives. It is understood that life itself is governed by nature, its laws of evolution, and consequence, but we think our lives are ours to curate. While it is true that life is in our hands, meditation can be thought of us surrendering our life back to life for a moment while we practice looking away. That seems to be a very challenging thing for us because we grip our destiny and carry the burden of its self-perceived perfection on our backs, like a dog unwilling to let go of a branch to big to fit through the door. We hold our future by ourselves and are left outside.
The deeper recognition that occurs while meditating is that maybe we aren’t as in control as we thought – perhaps the whole show of strength is an improvisation, a moment to moment interaction of choices, luck, and their consequences. We react to the random opportunities that present themselves as they present themselves, that is all, and a hyper-fixation with the distant future is not as critical as we may assume. While meditating and embracing that we don’t have to control the situation all the time, our bodies rhythms, our behaviors, and our thoughts are discovered to be governed by the cycles of nature, or Indra himself. Things just happen on their own. Life is witnessed to be automated and it feels good. That is the relief of pushing back the mind.
There is a healthy dose of pride and a modest bit of arrogance in thinking the future is ours to shape, but we are a proud species. While we all are not conquerors like Gengis Khan, Alexander the Great, or Atilla the Hun we all see ourselves as the conquering heroes of our own lives. We favor our power over the power of nature, chance, and fate. We resist letting the pieces fall where they fall because we think we know better. Like the farmer, many become exhausted with the duty that they themselves won’t relinquish even if for a moment. Like the farmer, while meditating, if we are willing to surrender our control we will find the lure of the mind far less attractive. What need is there to control what is managed so well? If Indra ever did offer his power back to the farmer, the farmer would politely refuse. “It is in your hands,” he might say
The short answer is, we lack trust and for good reason but meditation is about taking that unprecedented leap of faith. Like the farmer, the lesson is that all of life is in good hands.