An Experiment in Scotch

I’ve been med­i­tat­ing for 3 days now and even in that short period of time, I’ve come to real­ize how dif­fi­cult it is to do well. As I walked Scooter Wednes­day night, it occurred to me that my con­scious­ness is not unlike an untrained dog on a leash. If you have a dog, you know that when you are ini­tially train­ing (or retrain­ing in our case) your dog to walk on a leash, he wants to make it his walk. How­ever, that’s not the point of a walk (or of train­ing a dog in gen­eral). The dog must always know that he is not alpha dog and on walks, this means that he walks beside you on a loose leash, not lung­ing here or smelling there. Walks can be extremely frus­trat­ing for both you and the dog if this goal is not con­stantly enforced. Also, if the dog can­not walk on a leash with the under­stand­ing of the struc­ture, he can never be let off the leash to expe­ri­ence true freedom.

Med­i­ta­tion is like tak­ing your mind for a walk on a leash. The goal of med­i­ta­tion is to achieve con­trol over your mind. If you let it, your mind will go wher­ever it feels like, uncon­trolled and typ­i­cally badly behaved. Through med­i­ta­tion, you can con­trol your mind. In real­ity, this is what your mind wants, to under­stand its place in the world and to know the struc­ture of that world just like a dog is only well behaved when it fits into the hier­ar­chy, not only in his own doggy world but also in yours.

This prob­a­bly isn’t some amaz­ing insight to peo­ple who are expe­ri­enced with med­i­ta­tion but I keep com­ing back to it as I notice my mind wan­der­ing in both my med­i­ta­tions and in my daily life. My mind is undis­ci­plined and there­fore badly behaved. I can’t come up with new ideas either to write about or to develop on in code if my mind is undis­ci­plined. It is my goal over the next 40 days of med­i­ta­tion to gain back the con­trol of my mind that has been lost. If I am suc­cess­ful, I expect to have a con­scious­ness that can not only walk well on the leash of med­i­ta­tion but also often times be let off the leash with no fear of poor behav­ior. Only through dis­ci­pline can my mind really expe­ri­ence true free­dom. Only through the train­ing of med­i­ta­tion can my mind be allowed to explore freely ideas in a directed manner.