Mind, where is it?

The Practice of Being Happy. #11. What does your mind look like? As anyone ever asked you this? People ask us what our house looks like, what our job is like, what our spouses or friends are like, but who asks what our minds look like. And yet, this is where we live. This is the window through which we see our house, our job, our spouse..the whole world is in the window of the mind, like one of those giant aquarium where you can imagine that you are looking at the whole ocean.

Well, I’m sure you are saying you can’t see your mind to describe it, so we need a couple of analogies, a good metaphor, something we can use to say the mind is like…..fill in the blank. So from the beginning one needs a familiar form to stand in for the mind…because the mind won’t sit still for us to describe it. It’s like those fish in the aquarium swimming by the window. The fish aren’t the aquarium, but that’s all we see. And as soon as one passes another comes into view.

So lets use this analogy of the aquarium to describe the mind. Fish are thoughts. Lets notice them today. Find some quiet time and just notice the activity in the mind, like it was a window that is built into view of the ocean and schools of fish would come by or a single larger fish might stop and look at you looking at it. Image that you mind is this ocean and you are looking in on it. Just look at all those thoughts going by!

Notice how you will forget you are looking at the thoughts and you become the thoughts, going with them to someplace in time, maybe a fearful place or a happy place, but you forget the watcher for a moment. Then you remember you are the watcher. Notice the difference between these two states of consciousness, being in thought, watching thought.

Ask yourself this question:Who am I in this equation? Am I the thought? Am I the thinker of the thought? Am I aware of thinking…and just who is that? Am I inside the aquarium or outside the aquarium or both?