Mills 1 Joshuah Mills Professor Fran Voltz University Writing 1102 - 30 18 September 2014 Journal 3: Thinking about Thoughts I have never spent much time thinking about about thinking. Expectedly then, approaching meditation, even for just five five minutes, was to some some extent daunting. Mostly because it seemed unusual for me to give any attention to my thoughts even though thou gh it is something we all do continuously and uncontrollably. What I discovered however, was shockingly shockingly enlightening. Our minds are incredibly strange, and giving even just a few minutes to solely attend to our thoughts can completely change our perspective and mindset. What I found to surprisingly challenging was consciously entering a state of meditation. The fact that I was intentionally giving attention to my thoughts was overwhelmingly distracting at first; I am not used to thinking about thinking. My mind is usually focused on either what I am physically engaged in at the th e moment or on a specific thought or problem that I am giving intentional attention to, and it is only onl y on unusual occasions, such as the last few minutes b efore falling asleep, where my mind is solely occupied with random, random, unfiltered thoughts. However, these unintentional meditations are almost never reflected upon and as a result any thoughts, thou ghts, unless they are epiphanic or interesting, interesting, are lost completely. completely. I was unable to meditate until some other thought or idea came to mind to distract me. The frequency that these new thoughts thou ghts or ideas would come to mind was surprisingly rapid. For one moment I would become mindlessly mindlessly transfixed on an object of my surroundings where my thoughts became inexplicable and were not at all in the form of words or language,
Mills 2 and in the next moment I would retreat back into my mind, aware but not conscious of my surroundings, and my thoughts were more anal ytical and structured as if I was communicating with myself. I would repeatedly jump between two or three ideas, usually of no correlation, correlation, in an unpredictable order. Interestingly, there were were never any gaps between thoughts. I was constantly thinking thinking of something . Whenever I was not mentally engaged in an idea or thought I was was simply in a state state of awareness of myself and my surroundings; there were n ever any "in between" moments where wh ere there was an absence of either of these thought forms. I almost believe believe I have never experienced an absence of thought, as even when we are asleep our minds are occupied with dreams, or perhaps I simply would not remember these absences. It seemed that being in a state of awareness replaced the absence of thought and acted as a transition in between more specific ideas. The topics of the majority of my thoughts and ideas were mostly pointless with little to no analytical value. These thoughts were short lived and cycled in and out quickly. The only thoughts that I stayed mentally transfixed upon for ex tended periods, at least during this brief meditation session, were things things that I needed to do or were were particularly stressed about. My mind seemed to approach these thoughts more cognitively, as if they were problems that needed to be solved as opposed to simply random and meaningless ideas. I felt somewhat stressed but also more consciously engaged during periods where I came to these thoughts. It seemed as if my mind came to these problematic thoughts as if to work through them to come to a solution. Strangely enough, I felt as if my mind was capable of operating completely separate of myself. In fact, many of the thoughts thoughts I experienced had occurred numerously before I gave them any really attention, but it was not until meditating that I became intently aware of them. them. If there
Mills 3 is any benefit from from meditating, it is becoming aware of our thoughts and priorities. More simply put, the brief five minutes I spent alone with my thoughts helped me to become more completely aware of my consciousness.
