The troubled seas of mind

HERE IS A CIRCLE that turns and churns without end, a circle in which we are all at sea. Everything is in conflict and confusion, and the flow is erratic and fitful – for this is the turbulence of mind.

Great waves heave and swirl and splash and boil and bubble heavily, like the successive floodtides of powerful emotions. Long, toothy shark jaws of painful thoughts snap menacingly in the surf. Their sharp, serrated lines form a jagged starfish that wrestles and resists the waves. It both creates and is borne by the current, as thoughts and emotions prey on and spiral out of each other unceasingly in the tumbling vortex of this restless mental ocean.

But dive down below the surface of these waters troubled by the madness of mind, and the picture clears. In the still, calm depths of the inner ocean, the whirling waves are no more than a background disturbance, far far away, and the sharks are gone. This is the stillness that comes with meditation.