Lose It Before You Use It

I put my heart and soul into my work,
and have lost my mind in the process.
Vincent Van Gogh

What do most people mean when they talk about losing their minds? Surely it's not a statement of going beyond thought and connecting with the world as it is. No, the phrase "losing one’s mind" usually reflects the deep-seated fear that our sanity will begin to unravel like a ball of string and things will stop making sense. This fear leaves many of us holding tight to the reins of our thoughts believing that our sanity hinges on our ability to corral them to keep them from running wild.

The irony is that it is the very effort of holding on that creates the tension that we experience as "losing it." During the most stressful times we aren't losing our mind, we are in fact inseparable from it. We have identified ourselves with it and all of its musings, and have become addicted to it. The true insanity of this addiction is that we actually believe that we are our thoughts.

Even if we wanted to lose our minds we would find ourselves in a game of hide and seek where the seeker always knows our favorite hiding spots. The fact that we can question our own sanity is the way out of this game. The ability to look upon our thoughts puts distance between our real selves and the selves our minds have put together (often without our expressed permission). An old saying in psychology is that people who are really crazy do not sit around wondering if they are crazy. The rest of us who spend our time worrying that the nervous breakdown is just around the corner are simply experiencing the human condition of suffering. Feel better now?

Recovering addicts will often talk about their active addiction as if it had happened to someone else. Guess what? It did. This is the beauty of recovery of any kind; recovering the awareness that the external self is always changing. At a very basic and cellular level we are not the same person we were even a few days ago. Meanwhile, the true self, the canvas on which the material self is painted, is ever the same. We are never without this self. No matter what our minds tell us.

The next time you find yourself listening to your thoughts, and they sound like the ravings of a mad person, simply tell yourself “never mind.” For despite its efforts, the mind cannot take over the inner peace that is inside you, that is you, the peace that “surpasses all understanding.” This peace is our true inner nature and cannot be found by the mind because, as Ramana Marharshi pointed out, "the mind obscures the natural state." To find this peace simply drop the addiction to thinking. You won’t go crazy, but you will be out of your head.