Mindstuff

So the night before last, I was awake all night.  I had a headache and it wasn’t letting me sleep.  One of the interesting things I noticed was about the “thoughts” I was “thinking.”  My husband and I had spent the whole evening talking about a job-related decision he had to make—we had covered all the ins and outs and ups and downs.  Then finally we went to bed.  I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be sleeping because of my head and that he wasn’t going to be sleeping because of this decision.  All through the night, the main activity I would notice in my mind was “thinking” about all of the various things my husband and I had been talking about.  I keep putting quotation marks around the word thinking because what I realized was that I wasn’t really thinking.  It was just words and phrases and images flashing through my mind.  I wasn’t producing them or doing anything with them, they were just there.  But I could see how easy it could be to label it as worry or anxiety—if it had been my own decision rather than my husband's, I surely would have called it anxiety and I think I very well might have jumped right in and started wrestling with those “thoughts,” trying to go over everything one more time and sort things out.  But instead it was just what my mind was doing and really wasn’t very different at all from the pain I was experiencing physically.  Both the thoughts and sensations were just happening, moving, fluctuating, with nothing at all to do with “me.”

Patanjali’s definition of yoga is something like the “restraint of the modifications of the mindstuff.”  You always hear this term mindstuff.  I always thought it was kind of funny and maybe sort of understood why people would use this term, but I feel like I get it a little bit more.  "Mind" sounds like an entity, an object (though it isn't really), but "mindstuff" is the stuff of the mind, which is all this activity that we usually call "thoughts" only that doesn't seem like the right word because it implies thinking (which to me is a more active process than what's happening all the time in the mindstuff).  I’ve also heard an interpretation of this sutra (maybe from Jivamukti?) that says yoga is disidentification with the modifications of the mindstuff.  I think that’s what I got a clear taste of lying there in bed—not just not engaging with these thoughts but really seeing them as something completely separate from me.  Which is why, I guess, Patanjali goes on to say that when we do this, we know our own true nature.  I’ll leave you with this really great quote I just read by Wei Wu Wei:  “Why do you suffer? Because 99.9% of everything you think and everything you do is for yourself and there isn’t one.”