Thought Binds, Attention Liberates
By and large, human life is dominated by thought. In one sense, much praise is rightly heaped upon thought, as countless are its achievements beyond the shade of doubt. All the accomplishments of science and technology are thanks to thought and, further, there is some truth in the saying, “As you think, so you become.” However, the same power that put a man on the moon has caused endless wars and sorrowful starvation on the earth. We claim we have subdued Nature and made all the animals and birds on the planet subservient to us. The only cause of fear for us is – another man. Man has proved himself to be ungrateful, greedy and ever discontent, time and again. The culprit is, alas, man’s own thought, which is a process that is hard to understand and difficult to manage.
Desire is a form of thought. We may consider it a product of thought, when we regard thought in a much larger sense, as a process with many components that are woven in the form of a complex network. Then desire is just one of the many expressions of this multifaceted process. (To draw an analogy from mathematics and electronics, electromagnetic waves are analyzed with complex algebra with one of the components placed on the imaginary axis. The signal is expressed as x + iy. Both electric and magnetic forces travel together in space. This wave contains many kinds of information.) Thought carries many things – desires, resentments, beliefs, doubts and so on. So inscrutable are the ways of thought that the Vedanta1 exclaims, “There is no other ‘illusory power’ (maya, avidya) other than thought (mind).” All our ‘becoming somebody’ in the society or in the world loses its significance when, at the end of it, we are psychologically pretty much the same as ever before. If I had envied the pretty pencil set that the other girl in my class had, during my school days, I now envy the magnificent mansion the other businesswoman possesses in a very posh locality of my city. A thousand people may admire me for all the success I have got in my field but I burn with envy so often (if not day and night) thinking of the grand house of Kanchanamala2. The so-called power of thought has outwardly taken me to heights of glory but I inwardly remain at the same place where I was at the age of eight.
Therefore the wise have asked, “Can we change?” Their interest is the radical transformation in human psyche and not any superficial glory. They see that the realm of thought is fraught with problems. They do not believe that thought is the answer to the troubles caused by thought. Thought is a trickster. J Krishnamurti says, “Thought gives rise to desire and then thought says – I must control desire.” Maharshi Ramana compared thought with the thief-turned-policeman who was apparently searching for the thief and he himself had been the thief.
There is in every one of us another higher power – attention. Meditation is staying attentive, and not savoring some delicious thoughts. We may borrow noble thoughts from great traditions and, dwelling upon them, experience peace. Such exercises however do not go to the root cause of our bondage. Awareness – silent observation – reveals freedom, when all the machinations of thought get exposed and subside on their own. Silence surpasses the glory of word and thought.
Swami Chidananda
March 18, 2009
Notes:
1 na hyastyavidya manaso’tirikta – Viveka-Chudamani, verse 171
2 a name, not uncommon among Indian women, that means ‘a lady with a gold necklace’