“We become whole by stopping how the mind turns.” ~ Master Patanjali
We are meaning-making machines. We spend the majority of our waking day putting meaning into everything. In yoga philosophy, this is called the “Great Mistake”. The “mistake” is that our mind turns things around the wrong way. The book The Essential Yoga Sutra explains this by giving the example of a mother taking her small child to a movie and on the screen a man is hurting a puppy. The child cries out and runs up to the screen to hit the man and ends up only hurting herself. Her running up to the screen doesn’t stop the man; it has nothing to do with the man. To stop suffering, we must all realize that the bad man is not really on the movie screen.
We must become aware that life just is; we put the meaning into it. When we spend our time creating stories in our mind about the things we think we see – we end up like the child beating her fist against the bad man on the screen.
One of the guiding exercises in Stoicism is training your perception. Marcus Aurelius said, “Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been.” Another influential Stoic philosopher, Seneca said, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Practice today stopping the “Great Mistake”. Say to yourself, “Life just is. I put the meaning into it.”
