mind the gap

Mind the gap

If you have used the London underground railway, you might be familiar with this phrase: mind the gap. At some of the stations there is a gap between the platform and the train, and in these cases an announcement is made, mind the gap. It is also written on the platform. But whenever I hear or see this phrase, it makes me think of something else, the mind, the thinking mind. 

This is how most of us live our life, in our thoughts. That dominates our life. But if you look closely and watch your own mind, you will see that there are gaps between thoughts. They might be rather fleeting, a fraction of a second. Sometimes they may be more noticeable though. Perhaps something very unexpected has happened. A sudden noise or something alarming has caught your attention, and the thoughts stop for a moment, perhaps for a few seconds. It can happen if you notice something very beautiful. The feeling of beauty is there for a moment or two, before the thoughts come back. And the same with tastes and the other senses. 

If you practise meditation, of course, this is usually the aim – to create longer and longer gaps between the thoughts. And one reason we do this is to see that we are not our thoughts. Otherwise, without really thinking about it, we implicitly come to identify ourself with our thoughts, because they're so continuous, because they gobble up our attention all day long, leaving very little room for us to enjoy direct perception, or simply to sit in silent spaciousness with an empty mind. And with this identification, with the thoughts, comes a lot of trouble. It's a misidentification.

Thoughts are appearing in our mind, for sure, but there are gaps between them, and the gaps have tremendous significance. In the gap between two thoughts, the mind is silent. There are no words. And it's in that silence that we can feel the consciousness that underlies our awareness and our thoughts. The thoughts are not really of the significance that we give them. And once we start giving thoughts too much significance, once we start really believing them, we are in all sorts of trouble. We will kill each other for the sake of an idea. The idea might be a religious one. It might be a nation state, which is nothing but an idea. There are many ideas that human beings have killed each other for. And even within oneself, we tend to have a lot of anguish which comes from our own thoughts and believing in them and giving them too much significance. Thinking has a role to play, but it's a much more minor one than we normally like to believe.

Whilst we identify ourselves with our thoughts, we are bound to give them a great significance. They become a cornerstone of that ego, that sense of I, who I am. And that's the last thing we want to let go of, which is a bit of a pity, really, because that's also what causes us all our anguish. All our psychological suffering comes from this sense of I. And for most of us this sense of I is tightly bound up with our thoughts, that identification with our thoughts. So on a spiritual path, we need to break down that identification. And the way we do that is to start shifting the focus of our awareness from our thoughts to everything else. In particular, if we start to put awareness on the gaps between the thoughts, then we can really undermine the misidentification that we have with the thoughts. So I encourage you if you are not already meditating, give it a try. Mind the gap.