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Mind monkey or Monkey mind, from Chinese xinyuan and Sino-Japanese shin'en 心猿 [lit. "heart-/mind-monkey"], is a Buddhist term meaning "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable".
(Thanks, Wikipedia.)
Been looking for an image to illustrate the monkey mind I wrote about earlier. Or rather an image I can call up when I want to calm my own monkey mind. Think I've found it!
Done lots of garden stuff this afternoon, and used the time to think about thoughts. About thought itself.
The fact that we can think is utterly amazing. Our thoughts allow us to solve problems, create art, build computers, manipulate the world around us. Thinking is generally thought to be a Good Thing.
And yes, generally speaking thinking is a Good Thing.
But there's another side to the coin of thought. A darker side.
Thinking has run out of control. Most people are unable to turn off that constant stream of thought - unable to Not Think. And there are dangers in that situation. Here there be dragons.
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Ah, that must be where Natalie Goldberg got the "monkey mind" idea she uses in "Wild Mind" and in this interview http://tinyurl.com/oontal
ReplyDeleteInteresting interview, Merc. Thanks for the link.
ReplyDeleteMy monkey mind isn't just the negative 'you're no good at writing' creature Goldberg mentions. It's anything and everything - a constant internal chatter that I really have to struggle to send to sleep. I'm hoping it gets easier with constant practice.
Oh, I know the chatter. Do it all the time. Why do you always have to practice something? Why not unfold and just do? Re Goldberg, she never actually said where she picked up the monkey - ok, no wiki back then, but zen we were.
ReplyDeleteNatalie Goldberg studied with a Zen master who suggested that she make writing her meditation practice. She mentions that in either Wild Mind or Writing Down the Bones.
ReplyDeleteIt is supposed to get easier to quiet the chatter, and it does. It does, as with anything, sometimes depend on your emotional state and the state of your life. If you have a lot of external or internal turmoil, it can set you back and present a new challenge. It's not a reason to give up, though. It's just a chance to develop more discipline, more mastery, or whatever you want to call it.
I rather like the word "practice" as a description of the process. I take it as a reminder that improvement is always ahead. I think John said once that one of the things he liked about writing is that we can all keep getting better at it.
I wish I'd looked more deeply into Zen-related stuff decades ago, E. It would have made a huge difference, and my life would have been vastly improved.
ReplyDeleteMind you, I have a feeling that a little suffering is good for you.
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ReplyDeleteWell, as you might figure, I didn't learn meditation via Zen Buddhism. I stumbled across Jess Stearn's book Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet in 1968 and ended up learning meditation from the group founded to test and study the material from the Cayce's readings. That would definitely be a route that you would have taken, though.
ReplyDeleteI went on a binge reading every book that came out that came from the material in the readings, and at time a lot of them were being written. They were clear of the New Age slant at the time, and that, I think, was a very good thing. What I learned from reading did make a difference in my beliefs, and that has, most of the time, made a difference in how I think about, feel about, and react to the things that have happened in my life. However, that does not mean that I have achieved the perfect state of Zen detachment. I was 17 back then, so it's hard to say what I would have been like had I not encountered Stearn's book back then. It might have given me an ability I use almost 100% of the time, though. I am detached enough to step back and decide whether or not I want to react to a particular situation, and, if I choose to react, how and when I want to react.
I don't entirely accept the Zen goal of total detachment. I believe that, sometimes, involvement is necessary.
In any case, meditatin is not going to eliminate suffering, and I don't think seeking detachment does either. It just changes how you react to it, whether or not you cling to it and allow it to wound you and influence you the rest of your life. I would not have someone who has learned compassion for others from a wound they have suffered detach from their compassion, however.
This, by the way, is the post I removed. I didn't think that I was properly signed it to Google, but I guess I was.
Interesting stuff, E. But from what I know of Edgar Cayce, I don't think he would have added to my conviction that meditation works. He seemed to be far too invested in the notion of 'psychic powers' for my materialistic tastes.
ReplyDeleteWell, origianally, the A.R.E. (Association for Research and Enlightenment) was set up so that people could research whatever information interested them from the reading.
ReplyDeleteThere is, for example, information on health, diet, and exercise, some of which is being born out by medical research today -- an emphasis on fruits and vegetables; limiting meat to chicken, fish and lamb; and using peanut oil, at least peanut oil is the one I remember being emphasized.
Cayce wanted the emphasis be on research first and not just blind acceptance, and it still was that way back in the '70s. Read what was available and test it before accepting it.
As far as meditation goes, for those who wanted to develop or improve their psychic abilities, Cayce did insist that meditation was the safest route, although a less direct one. However, as you are finding, there are health benefits to it, and that is a major reason to meditate in itself.
It's the New Agers who emphasize only the psychic power information, and a lot of what they attribute to Cayce is inaccurate. Every once in a while I see a tabloid with a headline about prophecies made by Edgar Cayce. I bought one once. I can't say that I went to the readings and read every one of them, but I did read the books that were published in the '70s about Cayce's prophechies. If I remember correctly, I don't think there was a single prophecy in that tabloid that I had ever heard before.
So, don't necessarily believe what is now being said about Cayce. In fact, he was raised as a Southern Baptist and was worried for a long time about whether or not he should give readings. He was extrememly cautious about it. That's one of the reasons for the A.R.E., someone would follow up on the people who had received readings up to a year and even more later to make sure that the results were beneficial and not dangerous or even damning in the religious sense.
For that reason, the health readings are particularly well-backed up concerning how accurate they were and how helpful the treatments were. Cayce insisted though, that people not go with just whatever the readings recommended. He insisted that they take the information back to their doctors for approval and monitoring.
I didn't completely finish the point I started to make.
ReplyDeleteCayce's position was that people should focus on developing themselves as better people, better spouses, better parents, better neighbors, better employers or employees, better coworkers, better citizens/stewards of the world and whatever else came along with that -- be it wealth, political power, business success, social position, influence, or psychic ability -- would develop, if it was supposed to develop, as a side benefit.
People who are focused on being better people and on developing better relationships with the other people in all the other areas of their lives are far more likely to use whatever side benefits that come for beneficial and wise purposes than those focused on the pursuit of those benefits solely for the sake of possessing whichever of those benefits they desire.
That was a major point, and a repeated warning, to anyone who requested a reading about developing psychic ability in particular, but it holds true for the other side benefits as well. So, anyone who thinks or says that the Edgar Cayce readings are focused on and encourage the pursuit of psychic ability has never read what the readings actually say on the subject.
Working on becoming a better person and having better relationships with the people around us, though, just doesn't make good tabloid copy and isn't as exciting or impressive as working on becoming famous or wealthy or developing Harry-Potter-psychic-wizard-powers. Actually, psychic ability is pretty mundane compared to the Harry Potter image some people seem to have. I mean, really, Cayce laid down on a couch and appeared to take go to sleep for a nap. He was just able to answer questions in that state. How exciting is that, sitting with a steno pad writing down a question that somenone asks and then taking dictation from a napping man? No crystal ball, no meditation crystals, no taking someone's ring and fondling it, no shocked reaction to a card that appears in a tarot card layout as it's dealt, no robes, no appearance out of fog to the accompaniment of mystic music, no sitting in lotus position on a stool covered with lamb's wool up on a dais above everyone else. Have you ever seen a picture of Cayce? He looked like a quiet, churh-going, conservative, small town shop owner, which he actually was. He had a photography studio and taught an adult Sunday school class. He was OK for the time when he was giving readings, I suppose, back before television, but how would they have put that on television and made it exciting.
Things have been happening with work and writing lately that have, for good reason, given me "Monkey Mind." Yesterday morning while at work I felt a panic attack coming on (having had a bout of these before, I'm pretty certain I don't want to get into any of that mess again). I stomped it down, but anxiety lingered in the background waiting for nighttime.
ReplyDeleteI felt it coming at the first sign of sleep (it likes to hit me right when I'm falling), and all it took to make it go away was to remind myself, my sincerest, "What will matter the most in the seconds before I die" self, that I was lying next to the most important person in the world to me on a comfortable bed under a roof.
Consciously trying to enter a zen state has worked off and on, but what seems to work the best is to assign the proper level of importance to the things trying to wreck my soul.
(P.S. I realize you may not have been talking about anxiety at all, but I think constant chatter that distracts and disturbs still needs to be put in its place, so the anxiety story still works.)
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to read and comment, Kristen. That old free-floating anxiety thing is the worst kind of mind monkey. I'm glad you've found at least one way to put him in his place!
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