The first step in correcting a defect is that you must know the cause of the defect, its reason for existence, why it was developed. Everything exists for a reason or purpose. It does not matter if it is a useful or productive purpose in your opinion or destructive like cancer, there is an objective reason it came into existence.
For the monkey mind, the mental chatter, we have to wonder what could be the purpose of a mind that is constantly distracted? Why would you not want to be able to be focused? Why would the human mind be designed in a way to prevent you from being focused and having clear thoughts and being able to know what you are really feeling?
This is explained by seeing how prozac the antidepressant drug works. It effects your mind in such a way that you cannot stay focused on anything for more than two or three minutes. When you get into the depressed thoughts, you cannot stay focused on it and soon forget about the thought you are dwelling on that is depressing you and then you feel good again because you are not thinking about it.
The original purpose of this mental chatter is to be a natural prozac, to avoid you constantly feeling depressed and guilty for things you have done which you regret or missed out, or any other negative thoughts, and it often works. The problem is that you are so filled with negative thoughts and regrets that you keep the chatter going by changing to different negative thoughts and you cannot get it to stop. It was a good idea gone bad.
The mental chatter is there to distract you, except it works in the opposite, it distracts you from being at peace and focused. While distracting you from focusing on what is depressing you at the moment, it gives you other thoughts out of the library of thoughts in your mind, which often have a disproportionate number of negative to positive thoughts.
And so it does its job of distracting you but unfortunately provides other negative thoughts or fears in place and so we end up staying in a negative state.
The mind can take you to thoughts that could be pleasant or negative, it does not care, the point is to prevent you from staying focused for too long on any one thing that bothers you.
The way to cure it and settle the mind is to stop doing things that you regret and make you feel guilty or bad, or alternatively accept your inability to be perfect and that it is inevitable for you to make mistakes. With this attitude, the proportion of negative to positive thoughts changes to become more in the positive favour. The previous article entitled ‘Three Sides Of A Coin’ gives direction on how to reduce the thoughts and actions which create problems in your life.
We always live wishing we could change the past. Accept the past is gone and look to the future with a clean mind and you will not have as many negative thoughts for the monkey to bring up. Have no regrets, Look forward.
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