Silence of the mind is considered the main result in many spiritual practices. There are several ways to calm our mind.
Usually our mind is filled with a lot of thoughts and feelings. If we observe ourselves for a while, we will notice that we constantly have some thoughts that do not let us go for a second.
These can be snippets of phrases or melodies heard earlier, a mental conversation with someone on various topics, our fears, concerns for the future, and other thoughts. Our mind is constantly grinding a huge amount of information. This is his usual business.
The Indian mystic Osho Rajneesh called the mind a mad monkey, other researchers call it a machine. A very apt comparison. We pick up one thought without bringing it to its logical conclusion, switch to another, and so on.
Psychophysiologist A. V. Klyuev believes that our mind grinds a huge amount of thoughts with the sole purpose of nourishing our thoughts with energy. We pay attention to thoughts and, thus, give them nourishment. True, this process does not bring us any benefit. We just waste our energy on unnecessary and sometimes even harmful thoughts.
The fact that our thoughts are in most cases unnecessary does not require proof. It is enough to honestly observe yourself for a while.
One of the main pieces of advice given by A. V. Klyuev is not to give our thoughts our attention, just to ignore them. In this way, one can calm the mind and, with appropriate practice, stop the constant flickering of thoughts.
It is best to ignore thoughts in a playful way, observing them and at the same time not letting them involve us in interacting with them. This usually takes a while. We observe one thought, another, we keep a state of awareness, but some thought will definitely captivate us, and we will find ourselves in a dialogue with it. In this case, you just need to start over again. With some practice, the times when we are not engaged in dialogue with thoughts will increase and our mind will calm down.
