1/7/2024 0 Comments Monkey listening to music memeThe problem occurs when, like all small monkeys with lots of things to do, he’s quite excitable. He’s useful in that in our busy lives he keeps on top of things. The point is we actually need the monkey on our side. When we give our attention to too many things at once, spend our lives rushing from one appointment to another and focus on what we are yet to do instead of what we are currently doing, these are like dozens of trees with enticing fruit for our monkey to chase.Īmazing! Look at him go, there he is worrying about your date next Tuesday, oh, now he’s up that tree criticising your performance in work last week, then he’s reminding you that the car needs servicing. Instead we are carried away through the treetops!īecause of our innate capacity for thinking, it is easy for the Monkey Mind to feed on stimuli. With the noise of this monkey going on, it becomes near on impossible to be present and focused on the moment we are in. Under the conscious spark of awareness, we are accompanied by the ego – the chattering monkey of our internal monologue. Of course, he defined it best when he said ‘Just as a monkey swinging through the trees grabs one branch and lets it go only to seize another, so too, that which is called thought, mind or consciousness arises and disappears continually both day and night.’īeautifully and poetically put, but why does this monkey rule our thoughts, when we are supposed to be in charge? Causes of the Monkey Mind The Buddha, who coined the word some two and a half millennia ago, termed this mental state “ Kapicitta.” How infuriating and exhausting it becomes. Irrational fears perhaps, but made real by our own constant attention. What if I don’t have enough money when I retire? What will happen if I lose my job? I wonder if my partner might be unhappy with our relationship? This might sound like it might be fun, but in our troubled human way the thoughts that are often in our minds are concerned with the fears and pressures of life: You might imagine that each thought is a branch, and you, or at least the attention of your conscious mind, is indeed a monkey, swinging from thought-branch to thought-branch all day long. This analogy, slightly humorous though it may be, is actually quite salient.Ĭonsider that we humans have around fifty thousand separate thoughts each day, many of them on the same topic.
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