..."A lot of yoga teachers may try to get you to control your own mind, mainly to prove to you that you cannot do it. "A fool who persists in his folly will become wise," and so they speed up the folly. Initially you may have a certain amount of superficial success by a process commonly called self hypnosis, and you may think you are making progress. A good teacher will let you go along that way for a while, until he really throws you by asking, 'Why are you concentrating?'

Buddhism works very much in this way. Buddha said, 'If you suffer, you suffer because you desire, and your desires are either unattainable or always disappointed. So cut out desire.' So those disciples went away and they stamped on desire, jumped on desire, cut the throat of desire, and threw out desire. When they came back, Buddha said, 'But you are still desiring not to desire.' They wondered how to get rid of that desire. When you see that all of this is nonsense, there naturally comes over you a quietness. Seeing that you cannot control your mind you realize there is no controller. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts. What you took to be the feeler of the feelings is just one of the feelings. What you took to be the experiencer of experience is just a part of the experience.

There is not any thinker of thoughts or feeler of feelings. We get into that bind because our language has a grammatical rule that states that verbs must have subjects. The funny thing about this is that verbs are processes, and so are subjects and nouns, which are supposed to be things. How does a noun start a verb? How does a thing put a process into action? Obviously it cannot, but we always insist that there is this subject called the knower, and without a knower there cannot be knowing. However, that is just a grammatical rule, not a rule of nature. In nature there is just knowing." ~Alan Watts

Art by: Collin Elder - Fine Art