The man had been sitting in the bus station for a long time.
A friendly stranger asked him what bus he was waiting for.
'I'm not waiting for a bus, I am meditating.' he replied.
This seemed a bit odd! 'Why meditate in a busy bus station?' the stranger asked, 'Aren't all these buses a distraction?'
'Not at all', the man replied, 'the buses ARE my meditation. I watch them come and I watch them go. I don't know where they are coming from and I don't know where they are going. They don't belong to me and I don't intend to catch any of them. I just observe them and let them be.'
The point of this story?
Meditation is not about emptying the mind of thoughts. We don't need an empty bus station! It's about getting to know the mind and all the thinking that's going on. Thoughts are coming and going all the time like buses passing through the station. In meditation we learn that our thoughts are often misleading, unhelpful, fanciful, fearful, bullying, dull, silly, fortune telling. We don't need to run towards every thought, like a bus we must catch! We don't need to jump on these buses just because they turn up.
We don't need to cling or attach to thoughts as though they must be certain truth, pearls of undoubted wisdom containing vital information. We can even smile and be amused by this constant unsettled clamouring of the mind. We can notice that much of our thinking is total rubbish, of no use at all! What a delightful way to loosen the ego!
We learn this just by observing instead of grasping, by watching thoughts instead of leaping onto them as if life depended on it, by not taking ourselves and our thoughts too seriously. It takes time, intention, patience and some perseverance.
Many people try to meditate and think they can't do it because of all the thoughts that come tumbling in but that is where the practice must begin. It eventually leads to liberation from unnecessary suffering and unhelpful struggle.
'In meditative practice one notices clearly that most of the mind-stuff is pretty unbelievable. It's either old and gone or it hasn't even happened yet. Or it's plain fantasy. Most of the thoughts that flit through the mind have no real connection with anything. The mind usually grasps at some trigger and uses it to play its own games.' (Ayya Khema).