The battle to silence the mind can be a difficult one and often requires a degree of creativity and forcefulness. In this weeks meditation exercise, Sri Chinmoy offers another approach to dealing with thoughts by seeing good thoughts as friends and bad thoughts as enemies — and even giving them tangible physical attributes.

There are two kinds of thoughts: good thoughts and bad thoughts. One kind is healthy and one kind is unhealthy. Unhealthy thoughts, undivine thoughts, are our enemies, whereas good thoughts, divine thoughts, are our friends. We are standing at the door to our house and somebody is knocking at the door. We have to see whether it is a friend or enemy. If it is a friend, then we will allow him to enter. If it is an enemy, no, we will not allow him. But the difficulty is that sometimes when we open the door just a little. Immediately the enemies may force their way in. So what do we do? We don't open the door at all. We keep the door bolted from inside. Our real friends will not go away. They will think, “Something is wrong with him. Usually he is so kind to us. So there must be some special reason why he is not opening the door.” They have sympathetic oneness, so they will wait indefinitely.

But our enemies want only to bother us, to torture and destroy us. They will wait just for a few minutes. Then, after some time, they will lose all patience and say, “It is beneath our dignity to waste our time here.” These enemies have their pride. They have not conquered pride. They will say, “Who cares? Who needs him? Let us go and attack somebody else.” If we pay no attention to a monkey, the monkey will eventually go away and bite somebody else. It will enter into somebody else’s mind. But our friends will say, “No, we need him and he needs us. We will wait indefinitely for him.” So after a few minutes our enemies will go away. Then we can open the door, and our dearest friends will be there waiting for us.

Now let us take a thought. You will say that naturally you concentrate only on good thoughts. But unfortunately, we do unconsciously meditate on bad thoughts. Jealousy, doubt, suspicion — all these we cherish unconsciously. When this kind of bad thought comes, you have to feel that the bad thought represents a person. Just think of jealousy, fear, doubt and hypocrisy as people, and immediately give them a human form: “This fellow has undivine qualities.” When it is a good thought, also give it form: “This man has all good qualities — humility, sincerity and so on.”

Then what do you do? When you see a good man, feel that he is leading you and try to follow him as long as he wants you to. But if you see a bad man — a man full of fear, anxiety and so forth — feel that he is going to chase you mercilessly and that you have to immediately run away from him. You must never allow him to come near you. When you see someone destructive in front of you, immediately react as though he will destroy you. Feel that your very life is in danger. Very often in the spiritual life, people do not take bad thoughts seriously enough. We cherish these undivine qualities and feel that they are only insects pinching us. But when you have these undivine qualities, you have to feel that they are worse than dragons, something very dangerous.

(Source: Meditation: Humanity’s Race And Divinity’s Grace, Part 1 – by Sri Chinmoy)

Our absolutely dangerous
Destruction-enemies
Are within,
Inside our thought-jungles
And thought-clouds,
And nowhere else.
– Sri Chinmoy