Thursday, July 02, 2009

The Monkey Mind

The Monkey Mind is a perculiar beast.
Rampant. Illogical. Absurd.
It moves swiftly from one thought to the next.
It cannot stand still.
Yet with training, we can use the monkey mind to our advantage.
I caught the monkey redhanded just before.
It made me laugh.

I was trolling away through the interweb in my usual fashion. There but not. Surfing but not focusing. Thinking but not concentrating. A thousand thoughts drifting: past, present and future, all rolled seemingly together. The Monkey Mind. When suddenly a few  thoughts entered my head:
'All my friends are so active and I am not...I never complete anything....I am not proactive enough.'
 Perhaps it is the daily meditation activites I have been doing with my mate, Didier, is actually taking effect. Perhaps I am becoming more mindful?  Or Is it my cognitive behaviour training kicking into action again? Whatever the reason, it took me a spilt second to recognise its stupidity.

Rebuttal: 'Yes you are friends are active and so are you. But you are taking some time to go slow atm....Bullshit, you never complete anything; you have just faced some things as of late, where your priorites have been elsewhere, when you get more handle on your mental space, it will bring more focus.....and fuck off, you are not proactive enough. Eddie, must I remind you of your past achievements again: for fuck sakes, Ed, you went to SanFran through Twitter, you were pres of IH in 05- that was a fucking massive job remember?
Which leads me to my overachieving thought - the disillusion that motivated my within my brief divluge into cognitive absurdity. The universal monkey mind disillusion, I have called it. 
The paradoxical dichtomy of success and failure.
Exhibit A: 'Success' (NB: ' ' - To signify the complete arbitarness of success, depending on the mindframe of the individual)
When we have so-called 'success', our insatible hunger overwhelmes us. We want more.  People tell you have reached it, but still you think you are not.  We think it will crumble at our fingertips We think we will never get 'it' again.
Exhibit B: 'Failure' (NB: ' ' - To signify the complete arbitarness of  failure, depending on the mindframe of the individual)
When we have so called 'failure', we strive to 'get out of it'. We don't want it. People don't even notice it, but you feel it. We think it will stay with us forever. That will we never get that success again - we will remain a failure always. It is 'us', we think, admit briefly.


Buddhists said it brilliantly - our minds determine our reality.
Taoists gave it clarity - every is impermanent, just flow with the way.

You can fear your monkey mind. But if you are mindful, you can observe it, see its absurdity and laugh.
Humans are strange creatures, I tell ya.

1 comment:

Simon said...

Failure is an interesting concept. First of all it is a total constructed idea. We classify experience or events as being a failure when we don't get what we want out of them.

Maybe we should try and focus on having experiences and events, and seeing what we can learn from them, instead of projecting a desired reality which me measure our 'success' by (another constructed idea).

Isn't it crazy when you realise how crazy your mind is. Totally fucked.