Essence of the Upanishads by Eknath Easwaran

Author:Eknath Easwaran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nilgiri Press
Published: 2013-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

The Stream of Thought

Earlier I described the mind as a field of forces called samskaras. In equally contemporary terms, we can look on it also as a process – a flow of precise forms in chitta which we call thoughts.

When we watch this process for a while, what we see is the kind of meandering “stream of consciousness” that so fascinates some writers. If we could film our thoughts, in fact, I have no doubt that the result would win a prize in the experimental film festivals. We see a face; then comes some irritation, a memory, a grudge, a flash of anger, some unkind words, a desire, a hope, a twinge of fear, and so on, along a ceaseless course through past and future, among hopes, plans, remembrances, anxieties, and desires. When it is all over, the critics raise provocative questions: “What does it all mean? Why was that shot of Paris followed by those dogs? Why did we see the same memory three separate times?” Like a good artist, we can reply honestly, “It means what it is.” That is what most thinking amounts to.

In the deeper stages of meditation, however, we make an astonishing discovery: this “flow” is not continuous. Thoughts are formed, dissolved, and reformed in rapid succession; but between two successive thoughts there is no connection at all.

This has profound implications. For a thought-process to be compulsive, there has to be a connection between each thought and its neighbors; otherwise one thought could not cause the next to rise. When you begin to see that there is a little gap of no-thought between each two thoughts, all your responses can be free. At every moment there is a choice in what you think, and therefore in what you say and do.

This is an elusive idea, but I can draw out its applications with a number of illustrations. To do this effectively I shall be looking at the mind from several points of view. There may appear to be inconsistencies in this, as there can be if you try to superimpose photographs of the same object that have been taken from different angles with different lenses. But I am not trying to present a philosophical system. My sole purpose is to convey something that cannot easily be conveyed in words: how the mind works, so that we see how it can be changed.

In my village in India we used to celebrate certain holidays with fireworks displays, which were announced in a dramatic manner. We had a kind of miniature homemade cannon packed with gunpowder, and instead of a fuse the older boys in the village made a trail of gunpowder in little mounds, close to each other but not touching. Then the temple manager would ask for a volunteer – usually one of my cousins, the one who liked to play the part of a demon whenever we had a play. The priest would give him a torch. “Light the first pile,” he would say,

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