Sometimes you sit and are quickly engulfed by thoughts of what happened recently. Perhaps you went to a party the night before or a dinner with people you don't know all that well. Or you had an argument with someone close to you and you find that when you are sitting you begin to replay the experience in memory. You attempt to have the conversation you were having before again in your imagination. You think of the things you wish you hadn't said. You recall the look on that other person's face when you said them. You begin to feel in yourself the motive that caused you to say that thing you shouldn't have said. The self-regard. The anxiety. That desire to impress. The fear of being misunderstood. Whatever it was. And you're now witness to this horrible cascade of neurotic rumination.
Now, this is going on all the time in some sense, but when you're trying to meditate when you're trying to just follow the breath and it begins to happen, it becomes unusually salient. And you can begin to see the layers of it, the logic of it. And you glimpse the the self-concern to which it is anchored.
And all these tendencies of mind have an evolutionary history, obviously. You are after all a primate. You're a social animal. And your concern about how others view you is not an accident. In fact, it has been prepared for you over the course of millions of years. We have succeeded in large measure as a species because of this sort of concern.
In fact, we have evolved to be able to detect the gaze of others the whites of our eyes are as prominent as they are because we are this deeply social. It's important to know where someone is looking, that glance you caught or the glance others caught you making. It's meaningful.
Or continually advertising what we care about. The goals to which we're purposed by merely looking around. And you notice this in others. And they notice it in you. And you can even, however dimly, notice others noticing what you notice, it's like a hall of mirrors and this is something that is happening whenever you're around people, all day long.
These micro moments, micro expressions in the face. Little glitches in our interactions and they affect our state of mind. The effect how we feel about ourselves. And this in turn affects how we're able to behave in the next moment and some people have a very easy time of this, some people have very smooth interactions with others. They're comfortable in their own skin. And there are many for whom this almost never happens, where socializing with others is an ordeal. Almost always.
So wherever you are on this spectrum, and you probably slide back and forth across it depending on who you're with and how you're feeling at the moment, but wherever you are, in this instant it doesn't matter. In this instant, there is no reason to revisit any of that. In this instant, the memories of last night or your anxiety about the next moment, these are just appearances in consciousness. As you begin to train this capacity for merely being aware of what's arrisig in consciousness, you'll see that it's almost like consciousness has become shackled to a monkey. But it is not the monkey.
This monkey software that's being run, of social anxiety and self-concern, all of that's just appearing in this space of awareness, and when we meditate, whether we're formally meditating or we're just paying attention, clearly even in the midst of our living, those can be moments where we cut the connection to all of these evolved tendencies, merely by paying close attention and recognizing the space in which everything is appearing in each moment and that can be a profound relief. So whatever happened yesterday and whatever may yet happen today, take this moment and with clear attention to a sound or sensation or an arising thought, simply cease to be a monkey.