While practicing the exercises in this course, you might have already discovered a wonderful
sense of stillness that emerges whenever your mind becomes really quiet.
Most of the time, your mind is filled with non-stop activity - about family, friends,
work, home, and so on.
In contrast to all that noisy mental chatter, the stillness of meditation can come as a
great relief.
It's like being in a car next to a construction site where a powerful jack hammer pounds away.
When it finally stops, you feel like you're enveloped by a blanket of blissful silence.
It feels the same when the noisy chatter of your mind comes to a stop.
Minds are rarely silent, except in meditation and dreamless sleep.
They're often engaged in a steady stream of thoughts that flow from one idea or topic
to another.
Psychologists call this associative thinking because each thought has an association or
connection that links it to the next.
When you're relaxing with family or friends and your conversation casually rambles from
one subject to another, that's a good example of associative thinking.
This kind of thinking also stimulates creativity of all kinds.
Artists, writers and even scientists depend on associative thinking to come up with new
ideas.
So there's nothing inherently negative about it.
But when you sit to meditate, associative thinking happens to be the culprit that makes
your mind drift off into meandering streams of thought.
We saw that problem at the beginning of this chapter where a meditator was distracted by
the sound of a car pulling into his neighbor's driveway.
"Inhale 1,2,3.
Exhale 4,5,6.
Sounds like my neighbor just returned from his vacation.
Before he left, he promised to return the ladder he borrowed from me.
He still hasn t returned the ladder.
He didn't return my garden shears or shovel either."
Notice how the thoughts that distracted the meditator formed a series of links.
After hearing the car pull in, he thought about his neighbor.
Then he remembered the ladder that wasn't returned.
Next, he remembered other items that had not yet been returned.
Each thought inevitably led to a related thought, resulting in a chain of associative thinking.
Every day, your mind gets caught up in long chains of related thoughts.
Such is the nature of the mind.
How can you break free from these chains of thought during meditation?
Even though they're not like chains of steel or brass, chains of thought can be surprisingly
hard to break.
Associative thinking is habitual, and we all know how difficult it is to overcome a habit.
So instead of trying to break out of these chains of thought, a better strategy is to
actually harness the mind s tendency for associative thinking as an aid to meditation.
As they say, if you can't beat them, join them.
How?
Suppose a meditator deliberately entertains a special kind of thought, a thought that
leads not to a related thought, but to an identical thought.
For example, suppose the meditator starts by mentally reciting om.
Then, the first om thought leads to another om thought.
Each om links to another om, and in this way, a chain of related thoughts can be replaced
by a chain of identical thoughts, thoughts directed towards an alambana, an object of
meditation.
In the previous exercise where you chanted om, the alambana was the sound of the syllable.
Each om sound led to another om sound, and this chain of identical sounds helped you
concentrate your attention without getting distracted.
But om is not just a sound.
It's also a sacred mantra, a one-syllable mantra.
Various mantras, including om, are often recited silently for meditation.
The mental recitation of mantras harnesses the mind s tendency for associative thinking
by replacing chains of related thoughts with chains of mantras.
This powerful technique is one of the most widely practiced forms of meditation.
The use of mantras is the subject of the next chapter, which begins with the next lesson.