How to Develop a Clear Mind Awareness
Think about how pure clean water is not susceptible to pollution. Well, is everything that easy? The water is polluted and it's useless now. Never like that, water is such a thing that it knows how to clean it as it gets dirty.
Here in the mind is just like a water. It can get dirty, but it is still possible to be cleaned in itself.
Developing a clear mind is the direct result of being able to develop such a relationship with the body, and also the prerequisite for cultivating it in a paradoxical way. Our mind is constantly concerned with how the body feels, if you think about it, because we even experience our mental pleasures in the body. If you watch and categorize the thoughts in your mind for a few days, you will likely see the following or different versions of the following as subtitles for the thoughts passed:
The true nature of the mind
But is it really so? In the meditation tradition, the mind is considered a sense organ like the other five sense organs. In other words, the mind is a sixth sense organ for perceiving thoughts, just as the eye is for seeing objects and hearing sounds. If my mind is not made up of repetitive thoughts, feelings that torment me or give me pleasure, and is independent of them but perceives them, then what is my mind like? What is its shape? How is the color? What is its content like? What if my mind isn't those clouds and fog, or the sky they're in? Do clouds, fog, storm change the nature of the sky, do they infect the sky? Does it remove the clarity, transparency and infinity of the sky behind the clouds?
If I realize that I am not the thoughts, feelings and stories that come to my mind all the time, stop and torture me for a while, then pass and leave their place to someone else, and if I realize my sky, my clarity, my transparency in which these thoughts take place, then what would happen? What would my relationship be with facts, with the world, with myself?
What would my relationship be with my body and my heart? What would my relationship be with the eight earthly winds?
Achieving this clarity and developing this clarity permanently starts with the relationship we established with the body, which we talked about in our previous article: Being aware of the body and what happens in the body. Being aware of your breath. Being aware of how the body confuses our minds through desires and fears. Being aware of emotions and sensations. Build a strong relationship with the body.
Develop Concentration.
Think about the job we're trying to do. We're after something like confronting directly some situations and feelings that we automatically avoid, and trying to see directly the facts about them that we ignore. What kind of mental power do you think this requires? While trying to divert our attention away, especially towards the hut of the disconnected, we try to direct this attention to the things that we fear, hurt, and naturally want to escape, not touch, not feel. Don't we need serious concentration and the determination that it brings?
That's why almost every teaching that aims to confront us directly with the facts and realities inside and outside of us, and thus enabling us to see the truth within, makes it an important part of the way to strengthen our concentration muscle in some way.
Fortunately, concentration works like a muscle. If you run it, it thrives. The neuroplasticity of the brain, that is, its remodelability, comes to our aid in this regard. There is a permanent increase in gray cells in the centers that provide concentration in the brains of people who meditate regularly. At the same time, some features of these people, such as sensory and cognitive awareness, being able to control their reactivity, and even contentment, and the brain regions corresponding to these features are observed. These are the characteristics of a clear mind. In that respect, concentration enhancing applications
Making it a part of the ayat is critical to living our life as a celebration.
Reduce your busyness, simplify.
However, in order for this concentration to occur and the mind to become clear, we need to stay away from constantly busying and confusing the mind. If we constantly stir a turbid water with powdery soil in it, it will remain turbid. When we leave this water to itself, the sediments will settle to the bottom over time, the water will be purified and clear. So is the mind. It means creating space for ourselves and our minds, allowing it to settle down, giving it the opportunity to develop some skills that will lead to a clear mind. However, just as we pack a lot of stuff in a narrow room, it becomes impossible to move around in that room, so filling our minds with unnecessary preoccupations prevents it from moving fluently and identifying and focusing on the things that matter most.
The biggest problem here, unfortunately, is that we use our minds as a means of escaping pleasure. The phones in our hands, the television series, our ambitions, unnecessary worries, repetitive thoughts, and of course our pursuit of bodily pleasures are our mind-playing game of escaping from pain and discomfort, chasing pleasure and happiness. Our minds are constantly occupied now with what to buy, what to eat, how to get approval, how to be appreciated, how to secure myself physically or financially, how to achieve sexual and emotional satisfaction and pleasure, what more to achieve, how to expand my possibilities to gain more is it? Watch your thoughts: you will rarely find that a thought has passed except to move away from constant pain and discomfort and to seek satisfaction and pleasure. Almost all of our preoccupations are about desires and short-term pleasures.
"The trap of pleasures and desires."
In this respect, it is important to simplify and look at these desires more wisely. Perhaps the most important thing to realize is this: Most of the time, advertisements promise more than the product they advertise can deliver. Let's say you connected your happiness to finding the best flavor in the world. Finding that flavor is your most important goal. Can you imagine how your thoughts will be organized around this purpose? Then what does every meal you eat turn into? No, you say, that's not it either. Some flavors will approach that ideal taste, but you will never be able to get full satisfaction, be completely happy, and live in a state of never-ending dissatisfaction and unhappiness. How clear do you think this mind can be?
No, let's say one day you found that flavor, that wonderful flavor you were looking for. That's it! you said. This is the flavor I've been looking for, for years, for which I gave up everything. You ate well. You are very happy. And then? Let's say you have the opportunity to always eat the same food from now on. Eh? What about the 3rd meal? What about the 10th meal? So what is going to happen? How is our mind in this situation, what will it be preoccupied with?
Isn't that how our whole life is? If we are dealing with all these things, desires, ambitions, anxieties, etc. If we do not look wisely, our mind and attention will be completely covered with these clouds, we begin to think ourselves as these clouds. In such a mind, too, neither concentration nor clarity, nor the true nature of the mind can emerge from behind the clouds.
