Bigger on the Inside

I have to admit, my family and I are enjoying a nice little binge into the current revival of the British television show Dr. Who. If you’re anything like me, you love this particular combination: a little time travel, intergalactic drama, constantly refreshing romantic interest and an infinite range of period costumes. One of the recurring bits in this show involves the phrase, “it’s bigger on the inside.” I won’t ruin the joke, but it got me thinking recently that this is also a fairly accurate statement about the mind.

Of all the reasons people report to me when they show up to learn meditation, the most common involves something like getting the mind to quiet down, or to out-and-out shut up. Frankly, this makes perfect sense. In my observation, we’re living in a world that is generating more complex, rapid-fire, high-stimulation thought streams every day. The rate of increase seems to be rising as well. It’s almost impossible to catch a short break from the relentless mind, or to approach anything like decent rest. Who doesn’t relish the idea of being able to produce quiet mind on demand? But forget about making the mind behave itself. Hands down, the worst meditation instruction you’ll ever hear goes like this: To begin, quiet your mind. You may, if you’re lucky, enjoy a very brief interlude of clear sailing. After about 3 seconds, the mind kicks back on line, you call yourself a failure, quit, and get back to more important things like writing blog posts about what a flop you are at  meditation. This is a real loss. Because of a little imprecision in instruction, aspiring meditators don’t stick around for the reasonably short period of time necessary to get the chance to experience the subtle qualities of the mind.

The trick with the mind is to leave it be. I mean, really leave it alone. It’s like how you handle a sidewalk hawker, that guy who is going to keep up the sales banter to get you to pay attention.  Untrained, your mind is like this guy, producing long strings of narrative, discursive, slightly or not-so-slightly unsatisfied chatter. Even just catch his eye, and he’s got you on the hook. If you give anything to the 98% of your mind’s output that requires exactly zero of your attention, you just encourage more of same. Meanwhile you miss the vaster domain of mind available beyond the accustomed. Back on that crowded sidewalk, you turn your attention toward the crowd, the sky, you smell the scents and take in the sights all around you, and soon enough the hawker’s sales pitch is fading into nothingness. With a chattering mind, it’s the same. Let it go on, as it certainly will; it has a certain momentum it needs to spool out. Meanwhile, there’s an interesting array of sensations, smells, feelings, sounds within you and around you in the actual world of your experience. Choose one of these to orient to, and just smile and shake your head politely in a “no thanks” to the mind’s dwindling strategy to get you to buy.

And, be patiently ready for that view into the quiet mind when it appears soon enough. It’s like nothing you can anticipate, not possible to understand by virtue of someone else’s feeble description. It’s a lot like the Tardis. It’s bigger on the inside.

~ Margaret