Understanding how thoughts make the subconscious mind home

Try to meditate daily. Then, after you have mastered this, fix your timing to meditate at the same time every day. A time will come when your meditative state will have an echo in others; you will create an impact on them. Once you regulate your mind during meditation, the next step is to regulate your mind the rest of the time. Thoughts are rising all the time, but during meditation you become fully aware of what is happening inside, and that is why they speak so loudly.

When you have a session with a trainer, sometimes thoughts arise even more intensely than at other times. When they are good thoughts, you often enjoy them and they seem to expand further and further. But when the thoughts are not so good, when difficult thoughts surface, you may wonder why such thoughts are coming now, and struggle inside. It helps to remember that all these thoughts, good or bad, are only rising from your subconscious mind to be removed. Very rarely will you be able to recollect the actual thoughts afterwards, because they come from the unknown and they go to the unknown. So let them go. Just gently remind yourself that you are meditating.

How do such thoughts get into our subconscious minds in the first place, and make the ‘subconscious’ their home? This will be easier to understand when we explore the accumulation of impressionsand their cleaning.

I have always found it very useful to spend a few minutes scanning my system after meditation, to observe how I feel and what has happened inside. Then I write these observations down in a journal. I notice different things happening all the time and sometimes, nothing seems to be happening. That is also okay. For example, I may write, ‘Experienced nothing today,’ or ‘My mind was too busy with thoughts to meditate properly’. Simply write whatever happens, as a scientist would, and you will also start to notice cycles in your interest in the practice, in your ability to observe within, in your sensitivity to describe different states, and in your moods. You will notice different types of experiences.

Here is a personal example. I was very surprised by an entry I made quite a few years ago. At that time, a particular experience seemed very trivial to me. I had written that I saw a certain person during my meditation and we became one. Yesterday, by accident, I opened my diary to that page. It hit me like a rocket. I started crying afterwards. It made such an impact, but at the time I wrote it, it meant nothing.

Here is another one. In 1979, when I was still living in India, I had a dream, and in my journal, I wrote a description of the place I saw in the dream. It had a stream, giant trees 150 feet high, a big canopy, a large lawn and a small house. In the dream, I was seated beside my second guide, Chariji, and there were four or five others with us. I was even wondering in the dream, ‘This is a foreign land and I am in India.’ Later, in 1986, we were in Atlanta and Chariji said, ‘Let’s go to Albany.’ So, five or six of us went to Albany in New York State, and the place we visited was the place I had seen in my dream and described in my journal. I had dreamt about the exact location.

This is the second part of the series,‘How to tame the tornado ofthoughts in the mind’