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by rorykirchner
4488 days ago
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I have experienced this a couple of times while meditating, I think turning off thoughts is a bad description. It is more like divorcing yourself from your thoughts. Your thoughts become just another something that is happening, like a sound, something not you but external to you. Once that happens enough times you get used to the weird feeling of observing yourself think and you notice that sometimes the thoughts just completely stop and there is nothing. You don't will it to happen it just suddenly does. A lot of thinking is really useless, you worry about things you can't do anything about right now or just flit from thing to thing, it is pointless. When the flitting around thoughts stop you can use your mind more willfully, more like a tool. |
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The brain is a product of an Evolutionary process. Dawkins described Evolution best as "The Blind Watchmaker". Evolution leaves a lot of room for improvement. It is like a terrible engineer who only ever gets things right by sheer luck. Evolution is probably a pretty sloppy process. This is why I believe the brain, although amazingly-awesome, is poorly put together.
So what does any of this have to do with meditation? If you had a poorly constructed computer with lots of bugs in the software that crashed all the time, what would you do? You would probably frequently save your work and then reboot your computer. By rebooting your computer you prevent errors from propagating through the software and the operating system. I am going to extend this analogy to the human mind. Without periodically resetting our minds, more and more errors may begin to accumulate. Perhaps neural circuits begin to feedback endlessly on themselves in an escalating positive loop . Perhaps mediation is a way to dampen down mental activity, allowing the mind to reset.
It is just a crazy, bat-sh*t crazy idea. So don't take it too seriously.