Thought Process

How can we control the thought process?

Sadhguru: “I want to control the thought,” this itself is a thought. Once you get into this, trying to control the thought process, there is no end to it. It is an endless fight. One way is, the way of Isha Yoga; just let it be. Don’t bother about it. Let it go on by itself. You be aware of it. Slowly it loses its momentum and it falls away. That’s one way.

Another way is what we are doing now. You control your prana. Ultimately, whether it is your thought or your heart or the cellular activity, whatever it is that is happening in the body and within you is primarily supported by the prana. If you control the prana, there is no more thought. If you have sufficient mastery over your prana, you have mastery over your thought, your body and all the organic functions of the body. It is so.

As the the energy level rises a little bit and the flow is steady and there is control over it, thought is not there. See if I sit like this for hours together, I sit without a thought. I am not meditating. I am not doing anything. Simply I just sit there. I thought I would read a book, but generally these days, in the last three or four years, every time I pick up a book, I just read a few sentences or may be one or two pages.

After that I just sit, but that one sentence is enough to convey everything about the mind of the writer. It can be simply seen without the thought process. I’ve always been talking about this, the difference between looking, simply seeing and thinking. Just looking does not need the thought process. Looking does not mean only with physical eyes. Even with eyes closed you can look.

So once you develop awareness, you start looking, not thinking. When you are in full awareness, there is no thought process. The moment you are aware there is no thought. The moment the thought is there, your awareness has gone, generally. May be in meditation you are aware of the thought process, but otherwise it is generally so — unless you walk in the knack of Samyama, where you can be in the thought process and still be fully aware, which I doubt.

- Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev