Recently I got to thinking about the many years (about thirty-five) that I did my best to mentally repeat a mantra not only during my morning meditation, but also as much as possible during the rest of my daily activities.
UPDATE: I meandered quite a bit in coming to the conclusion expressed in this post's title. Here's the short version: The world is always changing. Unexpected challenges, surprises, problems, opportunities, and such continually pop up. Our minds should be similarly flexible to deal with these happenings in the world and our life. Rigidity should be avoided. But some meditation practices have a mentality of "you should always do..." or at least "You should do ... as much as possible." If that ... is being mindful of the reality both without and within us, great. If it's anything else, that's too much rigidity.
What spurred these thoughts was a book by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. I bought it two and half months ago, but it had been sitting in a pile of unread books until I decided to pull it out and start reading it.
It's more interesting than I thought it would be. The general thesis is familiar: that smartphones, social media, and other twenty-first century innovations are messing up our ability to focus and concentrate.
Of course, anyone who reads books about meditation written hundreds of years ago, and I've read a bunch of them, knows that people back then also were having trouble keeping their minds from straying to extraneous subjects. So the distracted mind is by no means a modern problem.
However, Gazzaley and Rosen describe why our current technological devices and the internet made the habitual problem of distraction an even bigger problem. I haven't gotten to their recommendations yet for how to deal with this.
The first book of their book lays out why our minds aren't designed to stick with just one thing. This isn't a bug, but a feature. For they say that likely evolution selected for distraction as an effective foraging method.
There an early human is, happily picking berries from plants growing wild (no agriculture yet) in a particular berry patch. Eventually this person notices that the berries are becoming harder to find, since so many have been picked. What to do?
Staying in that spot would be easy, but increasingly unproductive. Searching for a better supply of berries somewhere else would take time and energy, but it makes sense to do this when a current foraging location no longer is paying off.
So we humans are wired to forage. The difference now is that most of us don't forage for food, but for information. The authors write:
Now let's consider the MVT [marginal value theorem] and replace foraging for food resources with foraging for information resources, and insert you as the information foraging animal. Here, the patches are sources of information, such as a website, an email program, or your iPhone. Note that each of these patches exhibits diminishing returns of resources over time as you gradually deplete the information available from them, and/or you become bored or anxious with foraging the same source of information.
And so, given both your inherent knowledge of the diminishing resources in the current patch and your awareness of the transit time to reach a new information patch, you will inevitably decide to make a switch to a new information patch after some time has passed. Thus, the model reveals factors that influence our decisions about how long we fish in a particular information pond before moving on to fish in the next pond.
A basic point here is that our minds are flexible. Sometimes we're drawn to concentrate on a certain thing. Sometimes we're drawn to leave that thing and search out something else. This is one of the messages that is conveyed in the book through an easy to visualize scenario:
One of our thirsty ancestors is prowling through a deep forest and emerges into an unfamiliar clearing where he spots an enticing stream. Success! But, despite the powerful, actually reflexive, drive to drink, he does not charge forward. Rather, he pauses...suppresses the impulse, evaluates, reaches a decision, and formulates a goal.
Previous experience in this forest has taught him that where there is water, there is often also a highly effective predator hiding nearby -- the jaguar. This is where that critical pause in the perception-action reflex of "see water -- drink water" allows him to undertake an initial rapid evaluation of the situation to determine if this setting deserves more careful assessment.
This leads him to decide that there may indeed be an invisible threat. He then advances to establishing the top-down goal of carefully evaluating the safety of approaching the stream.
To accomplish his goal, he now engages his selective attention to focus his hearing on detecting a specific sound that he knows a jaguar makes when lying in wait for prey: a deep, nearly inaudible, guttural grumbling. He selectively directs his vision toward detecting the characteristic pattern and color of the jaguar: a strippled orange and black.
And knowing the distinctive odor of this creature, he selectively focuses his olfactory sense on its characteristic musky smell. In addition, he has the insight to know that this particular predator tends to hunt in the thick brush that lies along the left bank of the stream, and so he directs this multisensory selective attention like an arrow at that specific location in space: he fires and waits for a signal.
This scenario gets discussed in more detail by the authors. I'm sharing it to illustrate that our attention involves both top-down and bottom-up influences.
Top-down is what I'm doing right now: deciding to write a blog post about the book I'm reading, then using my attention to carry out that decision/goal. Bottom-up is what would happen if our smoke alarm went off while I was writing this post. That would instantly grab my attention and spur me to find out why the alarm is sounding.
Which gets me back to the mantra-repeating that I used to do. I still repeat a mantra occasionally when I meditate, and usually when I'm going to sleep. However, I have stopped repeating a mantra at other times during the day, which was encouraged during the thirty-five years I practiced a form of meditation taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an spiritual organization headquartered in India.
This now strikes me as making little or no sense. I talked about this in a 2024 blog post: "A time for mindfulness, a time for mind wandering."
During my intensely meditating years, when I'd spend about two hours a day in disciplined meditation, I also tried to repeat a mantra as much as possible during the rest of the day.
I'm not sure how to classify this activity, as mindfulness or mind wandering. Repeating a mantra while doing everyday activities like driving a car, washing dishes, or even talking to someone, seems to have characteristics of each.
For example, I started to do my mantra meditation thing seriously just after I graduated from college with a degree in psychology. While waiting to start in a master's of social work program, I had a job as a teacher's aide at Santa Clara High School.
Part of that job involved counseling students with behavioral problems. I didn't really know what I was doing when I talked with a student. Plus, I was so enthused about repeating my mantra as much as possible during the day, even at work, often I wouldn't be listening very attentively to what a student was telling me.
Looking back, I wasn't very mindful of the moment in which I found myself. My mind wasn't wandering, but it also wasn't paying full attention to the here-and-now of sensory/external reality. I was focused on repeating some words in my mind, my internal subjective reality.
So I can see the wisdom in the New York Times piece. It's good to let the mind wander, and it's good to let the mind be concentrated. No hard and fast rule here. Whatever seems appropriate at the time.
This is similar to the ancestor coming to a stream where a jaguar could be hiding. Mindfully walking to the water, bending down, and taking a drink while repeating a mantra to keep the mind focused on that activity risks becoming jaguar food. Using all of his senses to determine whether a jaguar is present is what our ancestor needs to do.
Likewise, we need to be flexible in how we use our minds, especially since there is no difference between us and our mind. Our mind is us, which is why we're constantly changing and adapting to new information, just like our ancestor approaching a stream.
sant64, the RSSB secretary said that Gill would attend satsang with Dhillon, the current guru. That didn't happen, according to the WhatsApp message. Gill was at a satsang all by himself. So this is why the person who sent the message said that RSSB has two gurus now. It wasn't me that made that claim, it was someone who attended the Gill-only satsang.
Here's an excerpt from a news story that I quoted from in a previous post:
https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2024/09/lets-make-sense-of-the-strange-rssb-guru-succession-episode.html
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Devender Kumar Sikri, secretary of the RSSB, said Gill would eventually be the Sant Satguru and will then have the authority of bestowing âNaam Daanâ. âTill then, he will remain in attendance with Babaji (Dhillon) for the scheduled satsangs,â he said.