Thoughts 29
Monkey mind
The mind keeps on jumping like a monkey is well known and an experience of everyone. Its also a common practice to try and control the mind. There are various meditation techniques taught to that effect. Soon these techniques, when not being used, fall apart! That is, the mind is meditative, at most, only while its involved in meditation.
While comparing the mind with the monkey’s unsteady behavior, we soon forget some other qualities of the monkey. A few months back, at Varadahalli Sridharashrama, I was sitting on top of the hill reading blissfully, when ruffles of leaves caught my attention. A monkey was trying to eat some seed-like fruits from a tree. The discipline with which it searched the fruits and ate them surprised me. There was a process it followed. It used to walk up a branch, picking only the fruits hidden among leaves and then trace its way back doing the same thing, before moving out to another branch and repeating the process. I kept on watching for a long time. It was as if the monkeys knew what is known as the depth-first algorithm!
Humans take undue credit for so-called inventions when all we do is discover! The nature has everything that there is to have, we just discover them and the ego takes over claiming them to be inventions.
Moving back to our topic of mind having monkey’s restless characteristics, it also has the power of monkey’s discipline that I just gave an example of. We fail to see that and are comfortable with accepting that the mind’s job is to jump around and then we let it be. Why not see that the mind’s job is to be disciplined in its search for the fruit that its born to eat? The fruit lies in the depth-first algorithm; there’s no point in moving across branches endlessly without going deep within the nearest branch known as yourself!