In This Episode…

“From one point of view, the only reason our thoughts are a distraction in meditation is that we’re interested in those thoughts. We’re more interested in thought than we are in what’s beyond thought. We’re more interested in the mind than in discovering who we are beyond the mind. So, the key to liberating ourselves from the prison of the mind is to become genuinely interested in that which is beyond thought entirely. When we fall in love with the unknown, the mystery of awakening will overtake us.”
—Craig Hamilton

Starting a meditation practice often means dealing with an endless stream of thoughts. It can feel almost impossible to break free from this thought stream that seems to dominate both our meditation and our life. We might even see our mind as a wild, unruly animal that needs to be tamed.

But what if there’s a different way to understand our mind and thoughts? One where the endless thought stream no longer captures and dominates our attention.

In “A Mind Like Water,” Craig explores one of the most liberating meditation practices we can undertake: the practice of allowing our mind to flow freely without giving it any attention.

As we awaken, we start to see that thoughts are not reality—they’re just constructs in our mind. When thoughts lose their grip on us, we can let our mind flow like water and allow the thought stream to do what it does.

Maybe you’ve already had a glimpse of what it feels like to have a free, fluid, and flowing mind. In this episode, Craig will demystify that experience and guide you in cultivating a mind like water, creating a completely new—and awakened—relationship to life.

We’ve also included a 12-minute guided meditation to help you experience this for yourself. Be sure to tune in when you can find a quiet space and won’t be interrupted.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

Discover More about Craig’s Awakened Life Membership Program

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Not engaging with the mind is often easier said than done. Sometimes we sit down with an intention to let go of the mind, to not be involved with our thoughts, but it just seems that thought is all there is.

The mind continually processes events from the past, plans for the future, and worries about this and that. Sometimes our meditation seems like the mind going on and on, and we think, “How could I possibly meditate with this mind that’s so relentlessly active?”

Cultivating a Mind Like Water

I want to share a little bit about what it means to have a mind like water, which is a traditional phrase from Zen, the goal being that we have a fluid, flowing consciousness or mind.

The metaphor of having a mind like water is a way to try to describe how awakened consciousness relates to the mind and to the thought stream.

One way of understanding the goal of our spiritual practice, and the nature of spiritual awakening, is that we become unhooked from the mind. We disidentify from the mind. We break our compulsive fixation on thought.

Prior to awakening, the world that we experience is largely a world constructed by the mind. It’s our thoughts, our beliefs, our stories, our interpretations, our labels, and our value judgments. The mind is constantly cranking out all of this material, all this content that I just listed: judging, evaluating, labeling, interpreting, making meaning, and telling stories.

Seeing Through the Fabrications of the Mind

In the unawakened condition, we take all of this content to be reality. As we awaken, we start to realize that it’s not reality, it’s only a set of constructs in our mind. Our thoughts are merely the fabrications of the mind.

The mind might be a useful tool, and it’s the only one we have innately for analyzing and strategizing and figuring things out, so it’s obviously an incredibly valuable support in the right hands, but it’s not reality, and it’s not me at my core. The thoughts that arise aren’t necessarily even mine, in the sense that I’m somehow the creator, generator, and thinker of the thoughts.

All of this awareness starts to unfold as we awaken, and we start to experience space around our thoughts, around the mind. We begin to see that the stories our mind tells us are not the story about reality. We just notice, “There’s the mind, with all of its theories and ideas and stories.”

Fundamentally, we find ourselves increasingly in a place of not knowing, of saying “I don’t know,” in relation to the mind. No matter how much certainty our mind can generate, as we’re awakening, we begin to realize, “Well, maybe. I don’t know if that’s true.”

Becoming Enamored with the Unknown

We start to become increasingly enamored with the unknown, with what we don’t yet know, with all the dimensions of reality that our mind can never know, and that concepts cannot touch. So our stories, our theories, and our interpretations, all the meaning-making, the labels, are all less interesting than the mystery that we’re living in.

This not-knowing is true in a practical sense, which means that all the mind’s ideas about everything going on around us, about other people and their motives, and what this or that means, and all our political beliefs, become less solid, rigid, and convincing to us.

It’s also true in an esoteric sense, which means we’re starting to become interested in that which is beyond the mind, who we are beyond the mind, and this depth dimension of being that is always a mystery, a place where the mind can’t go. We can begin to experience and live from this depth that’s not the thought stream, that’s not concepts. This place of depth becomes much more interesting to us than what our mind produces.

Letting the Thought Stream Do What It Does

To come back to the metaphor of “a mind like water,” what happens is that the mind is no longer our primary reference point for reality. It’s no longer our home and the place that we were dependent on and addicted to to help us figure everything out. Because that’s not our orientation as we’re awakening, we can let the mind flow freely.

We are not reacting to the content of our mind any longer. Thoughts don’t scare us or compel us. They don’t grab all of our attention, because they are not so central anymore to our way of orienting. And then we can let it flow. We can let the mind flow like water and let the thought stream do what it does.

At times it brings us very useful information. We don’t have an anti-intellectual bias, and we’re not in any way trying to push the mind away. We just see it for what it is. We start to actually relate to it for what it is, and a very free, fluid way of being ensues.

Knowing Vs Not Knowing

I teach this different way of relating to the mind in many of the meditations I lead. So I want to explain what I mean by knowing and not knowing.

What is the mind always doing? It’s always trying to know something, and it’s always insisting that it knows something. So how do we step out of the mind? We take the posture of, “I don’t know.” We hang out in “I don’t know,” and we relate to all of the mind’s stories from this place of not knowing.

Three Modes of Knowing

It helps to break down the thought process of “knowing.” There are three different modes of knowing that we are letting go of in meditation. I’ll call them labeling, interpreting, and evaluating.

1. Labeling
Labeling is describing or defining our experience. It’s basically a process of thinking, “This is what this is, that is what that is.” For instance, a feeling arises and we label it: “That’s a feeling of anxiety.” Or we experience some mental content and we label it “That’s my mind.” Or, we have some spiritual awareness begin to dawn and we say: “This must be what spiritual freedom feels like.” Whatever the content, we label our experience.

2. Interpreting
Next, we interpret our experience, asking ourselves what it means. You think, “I just felt some tension, I think that means I’m not meditating. I have a very busy mind, that must mean there are important things that I should be paying attention to, or it must mean I had too much coffee.” Or you notice you’re feeling tired in meditation, so you interpret it to mean: “I must be resistant to meditating.” Whatever we come up with, it’s story-making, interpreting, making meaning.

3. Evaluating
And finally, we evaluate our experience, judging it to be good or bad. You think, “I’m feeling really peaceful in meditation, this is good, I’m getting there. These are good, peaceful, easy feelings.” Or, “I’m feeling some kind of fear, or I’m feeling tension or anxiety, and that’s bad. I shouldn’t feel those.” Your mind’s quieting down, that’s good; your mind’s busy, that’s bad. It’s just evaluation.

Labeling, interpreting, and evaluating are the three core mechanisms of knowing. When I say let go of knowing, or when I say there’s no need to know, I mean there is no need to participate in those three mental activities.

How Can We Meditate with a Busy Mind?

Often in meditation our thoughts seem to be an obstacle. I have taught thousands of people to meditate, and heard questions from just as many. And one of the most common struggles people experience in meditation is with the mind. They ask, “How am I supposed to meditate if I have a busy mind?” That is the most common challenge for most of us.

It can seem impossible. Meditation sounds good technically, but people have no sense of how they can get some space from their mind. How can we let go of the need to know?

The compulsion to know seems relentless, and this is where it’s worth paying some attention to—what’s really behind that? Why does it seem so hard? What could be the secret that will allow us to inject that space we’re looking for, between us and the mind? To experience that freedom from the known?

We Want to Know More than Not Know

It’s worth noticing that, from one point of view, the only reason the mind is the focus of our meditation is because we’re very interested in the mind. We’re more interested in thought than we are in what’s beyond thought. We’re more interested in the mind than we are in who we are beyond the mind. We’re more interested in knowing something than we are in not knowing.

I’m not trying to indict anyone here, but just to be objective. We can see logically that if we weren’t interested in the mind, if we weren’t interested in knowing, if we didn’t care what the mind said, didn’t regard it as an authority, weren’t trying to know something, and weren’t compelled by the thought stream, then we wouldn’t give it much attention in the first place, and our attention would be very free to meditate. Logically, that makes sense.

I don’t point this out to make anybody feel bad about why they are not already interested in what’s beyond the mind or in the unknown. It’s not personal at all. This is almost everybody’s challenge. In my experience as a meditation teacher, 90% of people have a challenge with this at times, so it’s clearly not something unique to any of us. It’s not so much about our personal motives or our personal interests.

What If You Weren’t Interested in Thoughts?

However, it can help you get underneath the identification with thought if you start to reorient “What if I approached meditation, and I was more interested in going beyond the mind than listening to the mind? What if I sat down in meditation, and I was more interested in what I don’t know than in what my mind can know? What if I wasn’t interested in thoughts, and I said to myself, “Oh…more thoughts. Not interested…”

You could approach it by saying, “I’ve listened to my thoughts all day long. Maybe for this half hour I’m not interested. What if I just wasn’t interested? What else might there be other than thought? What else might I discover other than the mind if I lost interest in it for a little while, and became interested in something else? What if I was more interested in a mystery that my mind will never know? Would I give so much attention to thought?”

GUIDED MEDITATION – A Mind Like Water

I want to invite us to go straight into this approach I’ve just described.

First, settle into your meditation posture.

Take a few deep breaths, allowing the breath to carry out any tension, releasing it from the body, the mind, or the heart. As you come to rest in the present moment, I invite you to simply let go of your mind, let go of your thoughts.

I want to invite you to have no interest in your mind, no interest in thought, to just lose interest for a while.

Allow yourself to be interested in that which is beyond thought, in who you are beyond the mind. Allow yourself to be more interested in the unknown than in the known.

Not being interested in the mind won’t necessarily stop your mind from trying to capture your interest. Your mind might continue just as relentlessly to present you with stories and theories and ideas and interpretations. Judgments might continue to parade themselves in front of your attention.

But now you’re fundamentally not interested.

Because you now have no interest in the mind, no interest in thought, it makes it easier to step back from the mind when you notice you’re involved with it. If you’re not interested, you can easily take a step back, let it go, disengage. Because you’re more interested in the unknown now than in what you can know with your mind, you can find it easier to simply rest in the unknown. You’re not interested in knowing, and you have no need to know right now, no need to figure anything out. You have a mind like water.

I invite you to gently let go of the meditation. As you do, take a moment to notice the quality of your consciousness and become aware of how this kind of meditation changed your experience in this moment.