Have you ever tried meditation?

If you have, you know what I refer to, and if you haven't, let me paint a picture of what happens.

Using a simple frame of meditation, you choose to sit for 20 minutes, focusing on your breath.

You focus on the breath, not to find something there, but to have a reference point to notice when you lose the focus on your breath.

40 seconds in, that is exactly what will happen.

But where does your attention go instead?

It goes to the ever-present radio station called your thoughts, which most of us are consumed by, like watching TV or listening to the radio.

Only that it never stops. A constant commentary of all that you see and experience, turning around its most important character. You!

Now, when you sit in meditation, and you start paying attention to what is said inside your mind, for a moment, leaving the assumption that it is you that is talking, but instead, a channel that you can listen to, you start to realize that channel you tuned into is mostly garbage.

Judging, evaluating, comparing, rushing, wanting to get to, going away from, scattered, concerned what others might think, trying to make it!

A bunch of memory patterns, opinions, and evaluations.

One of the aims of meditation is to discover the uselessness of these thoughts to break one of our primary addictions.

The addiction to thinking.

Before we see the endless chatter in our heads for what it is, we tend to reason and defend our constant attention to it with the idea that something useful can be found by listening to it.

Understandably so, as for most of us, we tend to believe that we can find ourselves within the mirage of internal conversation. The conclusion then is that fi we where to let go of thinking, we would lose ourselves!

But if you really look at it, dissect it, and listen carefully to it, you find that most of what you think you are and most of the thoughts occurring in your head are simply a resistance to what is.

Wanting things to be different, a comparison with the past, others, or an idealistic idea we hold onto of who we "whould" be.

In staying stuck to that layer of our experience, the constant chatter in our head, we miss the most obvious and plain experience of ourselves.

That what we actually are is not a pattern in thought, not the opinions we hold, but the totality of this moment.

"For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere."

"I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware."
― Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen

As we break the addiction to believing all our thoughts, the constant attention we give our internal conversations, we are bound to discover a layer of reality that is beneath all the noise we normally are so absorbed by.

A layer that does not need words or explanations.

A Self that precedence every idea we could ever create about what and who we are.

And possibly you then discover that there is nothing of value to be found by listening to the chatter in your mind as life is lived here and now, right in front of us.