By Natasha Josefowitz, Ph.D.
LA JOLLA, California — When the Dalai Lama was asked whether he believes in the power of positive thinking, he replied: “I believe in the quiet mind!” That struck a chord within the cacophony of racing thoughts in my very unquiet mind.
The quiet mind does not fit in the culture of display depicted by David Brooks in his wonderful book, The Road to Character. Instead, he says we are compelled to compete in a world of high-tech information while continually updating our online social presence. Grandiosity is rewarded with approval, and so we keep pushing insatiably for more and more applause for our overt accomplishments. It is a bottomless pit screaming: “Notice me, notice me!” But it is not only in contemporary times that humans have striven to outdo themselves and others; in the 13th century Dante wrote: “The ardor to outshine burned in my bosom with a kind of rage.”
We pay a high price for always being on call like emergency-room physicians, running at top speed and never able to catch up. As Pico Iyer writes in his book The Art of Stillness, we have lost our Sundays and nights off. Our new greatest luxury is freedom from information overload and the chance to sit still. We need to go nowhere as a respite from running at top speed everywhere.
This respite can come from becoming invisible. In her article “How to Be Invisible” (New York Times, February 8, 2015), Akiko Busch advises that when circumstances confer invisibility upon us, perhaps it is something to appreciate and even welcome. Low-impact living, the ability to recede into the background, may provide us with a fuller appreciation for our place in the greater scheme of things. Silent attentiveness rather than active participation can allow us to absorb on a deep level the laws of social dynamics that go on around us.
It is our quiet mind that can lead us both to a sense of inner peace and to the freedom of expressing our essential being. A quiet mind is also a wildly creative mind, but in a different way. It is not necessarily just contemplative, it is also playful. It still holds on to the five-year-old child playing in the sandbox; it is still the 10-year-old looking with wonder at the night sky and the awkward 15-year-old adolescent with crushes and angst. The quiet mind is all of these. It likes to laugh uproariously at silly jokes and smile contentedly as it writes or paints or dances for its own pleasure. It has need of genuine expression, not to display its uniqueness nor superiority.
What stops us from playing is the fear of appearing foolish, of going into unknown territories and failing. We don’t trust our imagination, our “let’s pretend,” or “what if?” We have lost our primary senses as a way of knowing. Socrates said that a man learns more playing with ideas in his leisure time than by sitting in classrooms. Plato wisely added: Life must be lived as play, freed from the world of commerce and politics. But if we spend every waking moment engaged in augmenting our online social presence, there is no space left for our thoughts to play in.
I’m entranced with the notion of the quiet, attentive mind. Meditation accomplishes this, but it is only a few minutes at a time. What I aspire to is the quiet mind to be my everyday way of being. And so I wondered what would make my brain most efficient if I wanted a quiet mind. There are two key words: creativity and concern for others. Creativity is to receive; it resides in the brain’s higher cortex. It grows stronger with use. Concern for others is to give; it resides in the more primitive limbic system. The two brain regions, cortex and limbic, need to work together to help attain a quiet mind.
My own creativity is expressed in my writing and my needlework. I make needlepoint pillows for weddings and babies, stitching the names and dates with the newlyweds’ favorite colors and in pinks and blues for the newborns. My mind gets very quiet while I stitch.
Being there for others is really quite simple. Look around you and see where there is a need. It can be giving a helping hand to carry someone’s grocery bag, a shoulder to lean on, or a listening ear. Our most precious and limited commodity is our time; giving some of it to someone is the greatest gift. What quiets the mind the most is to have a sense of concern for all human beings.
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© Natasha Josefowitz. This article appeared initially in the La Jolla Village News. You may comment to natasha.josefowitz@sdjewishworld.com
This is a wonderful article. I was fortunate to have studied for three weeks in India with HH. An incredible experience. It is so hard to quiet the mind in an everyday western world, but I agree. Focusing on helping others helps. Having the discipline [mine has lapsed] to meditate helps, too.