I have a clear memory of the day I learned to think. One sunny morning, Mum and I were in the front yard. I was four years old. I know I was four, not five, because I started going to school at five. Before that, I had a lot of quiet time at home with Mum. Dad was at work and my older sisters were at school.
Somehow we got to talking about thoughts. I asked how thoughts were made. Mum explained to me, “It’s like talking, only you do it silently, inside your head.” This was a revelation to me. I’d never done that before, but I tried it straight away, forming words in my head, without moving my mouth. Words and then sentences and ideas.
I remember being a bit older, wishing I’d never learned how to talk in my head because sometimes I just wanted the thoughts to pipe down!
Monkey mind is a developmental stage
The other day, I read in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, all children reach a developmental stage around the age of five when they start to form their inner voice. It’s not a bad thing. It shapes our awareness and leads to more advanced thinking skills like setting goals and regulating emotions. But sometimes our inner voice causes suffering, if it’s anxious or overly critical.
There’s no way to avoid the constant chatter in our heads. Buddhists call it the “monkey mind.” We all have it, the random stream of consciousness that babbles away in our minds as we go about our day… and when we lie awake at night.
Practicing mindfulness or meditation, we become very familiar with the monkey mind. Statues of the Buddha sitting in stillness lead us to think that meditation equals internal stillness. Not so. Inside the mind, monkeys are always at play. It is a very rare thing to experience a quiet mind.
How yoga quiets the mind
Still, we keep trying. Yoga has many techniques to quiet the mind. From ayurvedic diets, to asanas (physical postures), to breathing practices and meditations, all point to the goal of training the mind to focus on one thing. That one thing could be the breath, the light of a candle, a sequence of postures, a sensation, or a visualization.
If we get good at focusing the mind, then we can reach deeper levels of meditation and, ultimately, have the kind of experience that cannot be described in words. It’s sometimes called enlightenment, oneness, or samādhi.
I don’t think I’ve ever met the kind of master who can sustain that quiet state of mind. As humans, our attention is constantly pulled in many directions by sensory experiences, memories, yearnings, misunderstandings, ego, and fears. The Buddha is famous because he was one of the rare few who became enlightened.
With practice, sometimes we can touch on this experience of oneness momentarily, and I suspect that on the threshold at the end of life samādhi becomes more accessible to us all.