Your brain is maybe 86 billion neurons. That’s 86,000,000,000. During meditation, you don’t have to tell them what to do. Each of your billions of neurons has maybe 200 Facebook friends, I mean synaptic connections. They chat back and forth 200 times a second. The number of interconnections might be more than there are atoms in the universe. What are they doing in there? Managing the flow of life in your trillions of cells. Assimilating what you have been learning in life and organizing it so the learning is at your fingertips.
This is the hum of life. One of the sweet skills of meditation is learning to hear it as music, as a current like a river, flowing with song, with harmony, with essential goodness. You don’t have to tell it what to do any more than you have to tell the ocean how to make waves and tides, or tell the stars how to revolve in the galaxy.
Part of learning to meditate is unlearning any patterns of over-control you may have. Unlearn the habit, if you have it, that you are supposed to tell your brain to shut up. You may have 60,000 thoughts in a day that you can perceive, and just underneath that are trillions of tiny decisions your brain is making to adjust your metabolism, your heartbeat, your breathing, to adapt to life.
Here is a skill: With all the thoughts you can perceive, and those just outside your range of perception, practice the attitude, “I just don’t care. I don’t care if I have 60,000 thoughts. I don’t care if my mind is filled with thousands of thoughts the instant I sit down to meditate. Let it be.”
