Taking Apart The Mind in Meditation

"In meditation,

if you observe
the process of identifying
with thoughts,
you will find that
there is a pleasure
in identifying with that thought.

And what I mean
by identifying
is you grab hold of that thought,
you make that thought you,
it becomes your identity.

So say a memory arises about
your mother
and immediately
you make that thought about you.

Instead of noticing
a thought just arouse
and letting it go,

you become involved with it,
you become involved
with the emotions,
memories and judgments
around it.

You become the person
in that story.

This is me, that's my Mom,
this is the story about my Mom
and me, how happy or sad
it makes me to remember this.

On and on it goes
all from a thought arising.

And in getting involved in that story,
a small amount of endorphins
are released.
You feel pleasure.

Every time you get involved
with a thought and turn it
into a story and make it about
you and your life,
there is a pleasure there.

And part of that pleasure
is that you are a someone
and someone special.

The sense of being an
individual self
is intoxicating to a certain
degree.

Otherwise,
why would you do it?

So what I want to point out
is in meditation
I am saying be aware
of thinking
instead of identifying,

yet there is a pleasure
there that you are giving up
in doing so.

If you are not identifying
with thinking,
then that sense of
being an individual person
is not there.

What is there,
what you are
is not definable,
it is not a solid something
with boundaries.

And so the pull is to
go back to that sense
of being an individual
with a story and a definition
and all the drama that goes
with it.

Because you do
get something out of it,
you do get a pleasure out of it.
It's like a security blanket.

Even in your most dramatic
emotions of sadness and loss
you get a hit off of it.

And I am not telling you
to stop it,
or give it up.

Just by being aware of this process,
being aware of how this whole
individual mind/self works
it begins to fall apart on
its own.

Simply through observation,
the whole self importance
of being an ego
begins to fall apart.

You stop romanticizing
this idea of 'me'
because the truth
of what is here
seems much more appealing
than the play
you have been caught up in.

Blessings,

Kip"