Zen Buddhism refer to the constant chatter of the mind as monkey mind.
The Buddha held that the human mind is filled with drunken monkeys flinging themselves from tree branches, jumping around, and chattering nonstop. He meant that our minds are in constant motion. Typical mind chatter sounds like the following:
- Your mind reading off a laundry list of to-do items.
- Your mind listing its fears, both real and imaginary.
- Your mind recalling hurtful things that have happened in the past.
- Your mind judging the present.
- Your mind creating catastrophic “what-if” scenarios of the future.
As a result of this monkey mind, it’s nearly impossible to slow down and enjoy the present. In addition, all that negativity affects our mood—making us unhappy, angry, restless, and anxious; it hampers our ability to concentrate; it has a negative impact on our behavior; and it interferes with our ability to have positive interactions with others.
Monkey mind is a Buddhist expression, which refers to the incessant chatter that goes on in our heads.
Like a restless monkey jumping from branch to branch, the mind is always on the move, producing up to 100,000 thoughts per day.
With the frantic pace of life these days, the modern monkey mind crashing through the jungle on amphetamines. It is little wonder that inner peace can seem difficult to find.
It is estimated that our brains are bombarded with seven times as much stimuli as our grandparents experienced.
Add to this the rising stress levels caused by increased working hours and longer traffic jams and it is a wonder that many people can cope at all.
The good news, however, is that, no matter how busy the mind is and how distant the prospect of finding inner peace seems, it is always there, within our reach. We just need to know where to look.
Finding happiness and inner peace is an uncovering process. They are not experiences to be gained anew. When we strip away that which is covering it up, (the main thing being our addiction to thinking) we discover that the peace we are seeking has been there all along.
The ‘monkey mind’ is a popular term that refers to the seemingly endless monologues going on inside our heads. It’s called the monkey mind, because like the activity of a monkey jumping from one thing to another, our thoughts seem to randomly jump around no matter how much we try to concentrate and control them. You eat breakfast without noticing the food because monkey mind was already thinking about the day's schedule; or arriving at work with no recollection of getting there, having been lost in obsessive thinking. At work, busy planning the weekend or even when simply walking along a quiet path and your mind will be thinking about almost everything except your immediate surroundings. Conversations you had earlier in the day, plans you have for later in the day – anything but what is going on in your present. It is this lack of focus on the present that is central to the working of the monkey mind.
Be like a child, free of mental chatter, absolutely present in the here and now. We can only notice the wonder and the beauty that surrounds us when we are present.
Meditation has been the traditional medicine for monkey mind, however it is very difficult to tame a mind that ceaselessly jumps from one idea to next idea, like a monkey jumping from tree to tree - especially (but not exclusively) during meditation.
Who is the real monkey here? You or your thinking mind? Who is the master?
The “battle ground’ of Man vs. Mind against itself. Fighting Monkey Mind is a battle you can’t win.
In Zen (Genpo style) Losing it means allowing the splitting mechanism in our head to break down by becoming one with whatever happens. In relation to the problem of monkey mind, this could be done in many ways. If for example you are sitting, sit as monkey mind. Become one with the unruly thinking process. Let me just stress, sitting as is not the same as sitting with monkey mind. Sitting with is akin to witnessing or observing the mind. This is just another split. The observer and the observed.
Sitting as monkey mind is different. It means no separation. No bars between you and the beast in your head. Enter the cage. Become monkey mind. In this version of Zen practice it is just a matter of letting go and relaxing into that, which is happening here and now.
Genpo says: “There is no barrier to begin with, nor a window to go through. The other shore does not exist. If this shore is not enough, it’s too bad” Genpo Roshi1994
Replies
AsWithin
SoWithout
I was born as a monkey, and I'll die as one. :)
i guess our ancestry runs deeper than we thought, so much for - evolution ... ;))
Good reminder!:) at the end of the day the monkey mind might have been far more fan than I thought.:)
D0n't hate or mock the monkey...please.
Nothing wrong with monkeys!
They have a marvelous sense of rhythm.,,
They have wonderful devotion...
Make friends with the monkey..love the monkey..he wants to be your friend...
it's always beneficial to acknowledge both sides.
thank you Hellen ;))
THOUGHTS CORELATION TO AWARENESS
The wake brain realy cannot stop dynamics. It follows from pure physics laws and boundary/innitial conditions way beyond our capacity to control, at least at the present moment.
DEFINE THOUGHTS
To what extend to each individual mean by 'thoughts' and 'awareness'? Does he include the 'chatter' and excludes visualizations, mental sounds, colors, smells, music etc? Nope! There isn't that significant reason to form such category. Most physicists tend to be 'graphical' thinkers. Most phyc is largely spatial reasoning. He rarely use 'chatter' in the mind to reason physically. A series of images, colors and equations does the job. Words are formed more of to communicate, especially to leymen, than to think. So there are several ways of thinking, not just the 'dialoque'.
POSITIVE TERM FOR 'SILENCING'
Silencing is associated with denying one their rights to express themselves. However thats not the major point. It isn't pure semantics. There is a point missed by 'silence'. Spirituality sounds like a war with 'monkeys' than an expansion of awareness, it sounds something negative. Everything we experience is better assigned a positive term than a negetion of terms that have other meanings contrary to the former. If I say 'physics beyond Newtonian physics', it is not as meaningfull as saying quantum physics or relativity. The latter is a QUESTION and not an ANSWER. This is cause everything we experience comes as 'something' per-se and not a mere lack of the things we experience in our earlier moments. The latter manifests as an ubsence of experience than a mystical experience.
Applying this to meditation, we describe more of the experience of the meditation than the ubsence of thoughts. When we are not seeing anything, we are rather seeing a black thing. When we are not thinking, we are rather thinking about nothing. We are focusing on the nothingness within and without. Thats why Buddhist rather like to meditate on nothingness. It is a more positive persuite than a mere 'silence'
ATENSION DIVERSION
There is also a question of whether thoughts disapear or rather we simply loose awareness of them. When you are not thinking about birds around you, they can tend to disapear off the background. If this latter is the case, an 'expert' meditator might as well be the one who is not good at integrating many things in the awareness all at once!
we ourselves always get on our way to our inner peace and happiness etc … we are our best friends but also we are our worse enemies. The challenge is not in ‘thinking’ the challenge is in processing the ‘thinking’ … the mind wants to map every single experience, which only creates more thoughts and more processing. However realization of thoughts only happens when the process stops. Thinking processes take time, realization is instantaneous, it is not about thinking but more like a focus of attention formed by thinking. Thinking is a constriction of attention, with sensation of tension narrowed down to a singular point patterning process. Now Realization is relaxed constriction of attention with simply noticing mental process and allowing it to expand so that we can see what’s actually already here.
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
-
5
of 5 Next