I’m definitely not an expert in meditation. In fact, I think that there are as many ways to meditate as there are people on the planet. So I really can’t tell anyone how to do it. But maybe I can share why, for me, mediation is important.

In a way, when I meditate, I’m lending my mind to God. You may say: Fuck that. I won’t lend my mind to anyone. My mind is mine. It’s what makes me me. True enough. I shouldn’t lend my mind to anyone, or I become their slave. But let’s take a look at what I do lend my mind to.

They’ve done studies, and the majority of mental content is negative. Why? The brain is designed to protect us from danger. If you’re like most genetic males, then when you walk into a room, your basic brain, the reptilian part that hides underneath all the other mattresses of brains, does two things without you even knowing it: It looks for potential mates, and it assesses for threats.

Threat assessment. My mind is always trying to warn me against danger. That worked great when I was out among the tall grass on the savannah, taking a piss, and a lion was stalking me from behind. But today, when there are no lions roaming around my bathroom (last time I checked), what’s that little inner reptile in my brain supposed to do? It’s out of a job. It needs something to do. So it assesses for threats that aren’t really threats: He snubbed me. She won’t go out with me. Oh no, I’ took my colon cleanse and I’m out of toilet paper. You get the picture. And the reptile within has absolutely no social nuance. That’s why it’s always getting into bar fights. It can’t tell the difference between a cold snub and a cold-blooded rattler.

And my brain is always thinking something. It’s very active. It think’s it’s trying to help me, by warning me, by protecting me against all that imagined danger. I was on an L train once during morning rush hour, and all these other commuters crammed themselves into the train car with me in downtown Chicago. I scanned the crowd, and almost everyone had a silent, sullen look, a frozen gaze of depression or desperation or worry. Maybe it was because I was hungover, I don’t know. But it hit me that morning years ago that the majority of what we think disturbs us. And we’re the ones who think it. We’re the gatekeepers of our thoughts. We’re in charge of what we think, and we make ourselves miserable with our thoughts. We’re always thinking something, and what we think usually isn’t very nice, very helpful, very positive. Most of our thoughts are either fearful – because our heads are living in the future, warning us against nonexistent threats – or they’re angry, because our inner reptiles are in fight or flight mode. Or their resentful, which is anger that that’s more than a day old, because our brains are constantly rehashing the past.

And we seem to lose control over it. If our minds are constantly thinking and we’re not paying attention to those thoughts, then our thoughts end up thinking us. It’s the automaticity of thought. Programs we design, recordings we make inside our heads, endlessly replay. They may be memories of things that might have happened the way we think they did, or maybe they didn’t. They may be fantasies of future events that may play out the way our heads tell us they should, or maybe they won’t. And most thoughts are negative. Whether it’s a bad experience in the past or some danger lying in wait in some possible future, most of what we think isn’t positive, or even very helpful.

We’re not very conscious of much of what we think, or very intentional about our thoughts. Our minds are a garden in constant need of weeding, and we just walk past the thistles without looking. We choose our thoughts. We decide on the content of our minds implicitly. Most of the time, we delegate our choice of what to think to our own little apps and algos that run automatically in the background. These comprise our stories about ourselves, our lives, about others, and about the world. Our own little operating systems of negative content are based on our beliefs, which usually involve organizing our identities around our vulnerability, around our pain and suffering and the injustices we believe others have done to us.

Maybe we let others download our programming into us. We watch TV, or go online and look at the news. We watch commercials about garlic-knotted pizza crust (no shit), listen to love songs about how she done me wrong and oh I’ll never fall in love again. Maybe it’s the spyware of infomercials or the malware of fake news that we tune into because we want something, someone, to fill our minds for us. It’s like not doing our own cooking. We get lazy and settle for fast food. Or maybe we want someone to agree with our predetermined stories about how the world works, about how people are. It doesn’t matter. We may be empty. We may be lazy. We may be just plain old tired and disillusioned, so we let the world select for us what we’ll think, what version of ‘reality’ we’ll see.

So, you see, if you’re like most of us, you’re already renting your mind out to something else, to many something elses, and they’re not even paying you for it. Whether it’s your own programming endlessly re-looping, or the propaganda fed to us by our channels and websites, we let something or somebody else do our thinking for us. We meditate alright, but often on the wrong things. We’re always meditating. And we’re usually lending our minds to something which really doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

So I can meditate on the negative, or I can mediate consciously and constructively. When I meditate consciously and constructively, my meditation is, in very general terms, emptying my mind of all that false and negative content I’ve just been describing, if even for a brief span of time. It’s to empty the mind of its thoughts and feelings, of its urges and insistencies, and then looking at that content. It’s like a house cleaning, without judgment. It’s just looking at what it is we think we are, since most of us confuse what we are with what we think. And since what we think is often negative, we see ourselves and others as negative.

Our problem is that we think that what we think is real, and that it’s true. I saw it on a bumper sticker once: DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU THINK.

Meditation allows me the freedom to see that I am not what I think, that my thoughts aren’t real. And that not everything I think is true. In fact, almost every thought I have is derived. It’s given to me by something or somebody else: my parents when I was 4, TV, the internet, a critical lover, a book that told me about the fearful nature of God. I assume facts not in evidence, as they say in courts of law. And almost everything I think is a rerun. It’s an old thought, sometimes a rerun of someone else’s rerun, passed on through the generations.

What I think becomes what I believe. And what I believe becomes my life. From these small bits and bytes of thought, I build my stories. And from these stories I construct the edifice of my life.  What I think determines my whole destiny, and it all starts with what I’m thinking about when I’m on the train on my way to work.

That’s why I meditate.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within