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Turning the mind away from negative cycles of thought

We all labour under the illusion that we are in control of our thought process, but even a cursory look at your daily thoughts can reveal the exact opposite. Sometimes your mind can seem like a plane that is on autopilot, and there is nothing you can do to wrest away the controls even though you might be thinking very destructive thoughts that are doing nothing except making you unhappy. Depending on the person, we can think anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 thoughts each day, and if we're honest with ourselves, very few of them are directed to the immediate task we're facing - we're either thinking over something that happened in the past or playing out some imagined future.

So how do we begin having the thoughts that only we want to have? According to meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy, the first thing is to allocate a period of time in the day where you try to keep your mind completely silent. "If one is a beginner, he should not allow any thought to enter his mind at all.", he explains. "He would like to allow his friends to enter, but he does not know who his friends are. And even if he does know who his friends are, when he opens the door for them he may find that his enemies are standing right in front of them, and before his friends can cross the threshold, his enemies are deep inside the room. Once the enemies enter, it is very difficult to chase them out." Only by learning to keep the mind silent can you gradually learn to develop the discrimination necessary to keep the negative thoughts out whilst allowing only positive ones in.

The easiest way for beginners to keep the mind silent is by using the power of concentration. Concentration is the art of bringing your awareness to one particular object - common objects to begin concentrating on are a candle or a flower. "The mind, the entire mind, has to be focused on a particular object or subject. If you are concentrating on the petal of a flower, try to feel that only you and the petal exist, that nothing else exists in the entire world but you and the petal. You will look neither forward nor backward, upward nor inward. You will just try to pierce the object that you are focusing on with your one-pointed concentration. But this concentration is not an aggressive way of looking into a thing or entering into an object. Far from it! This concentration comes directly from the heart, or more precisely, from the soul." When concentrating you can feel you are breathing in from the object directly into the heart centre in the middle of your chest, that place where you can feel the core of your existence. When you breath out you can feel that the breath is leaving the heart centre and entering straight into the object. At the beginning, you can do the exercise for 5 minutes each day, and then increase it as your concentration capacity naturally expands.

When you have sufficient inner strength, you can then decide which thoughts to let in and keep out. In fact, according to Sri Chinmoy, you can even go a stage further when you get more inner strength and enter into those negative thoughts to transform them into positive ones: "If you have enough inner strength, when an undivine thought comes into your mind you will not reject it; you will transform it. It is like this. Somebody has knocked at your door. If you know that you have enough strength to compel him to behave properly once he enters, then you can open the door and allow him to come in. But if you do not have the power to compel him to behave, then it would be wise to keep your door closed. Let it remain closed for a day or for a month or for a year. When you gain more strength, then accept the challenge and open the door. For if these wrong thoughts are not conquered, they will come back to bother you again and again."

As we can see, turning the tide of negative thinking can be a multi-stage process: first learning to clear your mind of thoughts completely, then learning to only let in the positive ones, then finally learning to conquer the negative ones so they never come back again.

Photo credit: Kedar Misani

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