Friday, May 18, 2012

When the Mind Wanders

"Be a wanderer," Jesus says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.

Sometimes people complain, "I can't meditate because my mind wanders." If your meditation doesn't work, you must have turned it into a job!

Stop working during meditation. The sign of life is the wave. All energy manifests in waves of rest and activity. When we work, we are active, then we rest. And when we rest, we restore energy by not-working. That is the Sabbath, and God's Sabbath rest is as sacred as God's work.

Meditation is not work but play! You mind wanders because it follows its innate tendency to play. In Sanskrit texts this playfulness is divine: it is called lilla. The scriptures of India tell us that God's deepest motive for creating the universe was simply lilla, to play.

Instead of trying to stop the mind and control it, just ride the waves of wandering. Let the very tendency of the mind to wander refresh you. And let your very non-resistance of wandering be your only object of meditation. Regard nothing your mind does, nowhere it goes, as a distraction.

What we mean when we say that our mind has wandered is that we have lost awareness. Awareness of what? We only wander in relation to some place else. If there is nowhere else to be but where we are, then wandering is a dance, and we are always dancing at the center of the universe.

So the next time you meditate, let your mind wander in all directions at once, expanding like a blossom to the edges of the universe. Just watch. How wonderful! When you are awake, a wander is a wonder.

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