The Path Opens Up

If I just sit and watch the birds, my mind wants to commentate. It wants to generate meaning and it wants to tell stories. 

None of this is bad, it just is the nature of the mind. It makes noise.

The problem begins when the noise that the mind makes starts to be taken for "the truth", or "the way that it is", or "the way I am". At that moment, I am no longer connected to life. I am now connected to my interpretation of life - not life itself.

Most of us have become mesmerized by the internal monologue. It has become reality for us. It has become the 'master interpreter' through which we get our experience of life. As we grow older it becomes more and more re-inforced and most of us get trapped inside of our story and can't get out.

 

Because the internal monologue can be non-stop, we can quite possibly live in a perpetual reaction to what our story is telling us about reality. This can be exhausting. The internal monologue wants us to look for things to validate our story, which in turn strengthens our ego - our false sense of self. Over time, we accrete a mental/emotional prison that we can't get out of. We have sealed ourselves in.

To get out of the prison is to stop living in reaction to the internal monologue. We must pull awareness away from identifying with our thoughts. Thoughts are necessary, but they are a tool apart from who we are. We use thoughts. Thoughts should not use us. Hear the internal monologue within and recognize it as not who you are. That is a first step and it is a quantum leap. 

From there, much is revealed and the path opens up.