What Do You Think About During Meditation?

I’m halfway through an interesting book titled “Footprints in the Snow,”  the autobiography of a Chinese Buddhist monk who grew up during World War II and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  It’s a story of how he struggled to keep his inner peace while the world around him was losing theirs.

One of the chapters I found interesting was when he was trying to learn how to meditate.  His teachers told him to just sit.  He asked them what he should think about when he sat.  They said, “don’t think, just sit.”  He couldn’t understand at first.  It’s something I struggled with when I first began to meditate.

So what do you think about during meditation?  Nothing.  During meditation, you don’t think.  That doesn’t mean that thoughts don’t enter your mind.  Of course they do.  It means that you shouldn’t be actively creating them.

Sound confusing?  Probably.  In the meditation system that I try to follow (Vipassana or “insight” meditation), the intent is to sit and simply watch what is happening in your body and mind.  You don’t actively create the thoughts that come into your mind but you don’t attempt to suppress them either.  You simply watch them pop up, float around for a while, and then fade away, usually to be replaced by another.  If you try to force them away, you simply create more – just like trying to calm the surface of a pool of water only disturbs it further.

If you try to stop a thought, you tend to become engaged in it.  You’ll chase it around and before you know it, you’re planning what’s for dinner.  This is called “monkey mind” because your mind chases thoughts back and forth like a monkey chasing butterflies.  In this state, your mind never rests because it’s always engaged in an internal conversation that never stops.

So don’t do it.  Just sit and watch it all unfold.  Try to be an objective observer, nothing more.  If a thought pops up (and they will), just see it.  Watch it arise, stay for a while, and then fade away.  Eventually, you’ll find that these thoughts will pop up less and less frequently.  When that happens, you’ll find a peace and tranquility that you’ve never known before.  It’s a silence that’s both completely void of everything and yet, full of everything.  That’s when real insight (Vipassana) takes place, when you see things as they really are.  It’s when you hear the voice of God.

And it all begins with just sitting.

Please don’t think that you have to be Buddhist to meditate, or that meditation will turn you into a Buddhist.  Meditation is an important part of almost all religions.  The Bible says, “Be still and know that I am God.”  How do you learn to “be still?”  Through meditation.

So what do you think about when you meditate?  You don’t think at all.  You just sit…

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